As Rudy Giuliani searched for damaging information on the Bidens in Ukraine, waged shadow diplomatic campaigns in Venezuela and Turkey, and spoke regularly to President Donald Trump about all of it, a 19-year-old law student was quietly watching and soaking it all in.
The saga of Lev Parnas, a close former Giuliani associate and fixer, is familiar by now: Parnas helped Giuliani investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, an endeavor that ultimately led to the president’s impeachment.
Unknown until this week, however, was that Parnas’ son Aaron was present for much of it. And he has now written an eyewitness account of many of the back-channel dealings conducted by Giuliani and a small group of his confidants to help their clients — chief among them the president of the United States.
“I had no intention of writing this book before a few weeks ago,” the younger Parnas, who recently graduated from George Washington University Law School in D.C., said in an interview. “But after I finished the bar exam, I began thinking about how young Republicans and young people in general often feel like they don't have a place in the political system and might not want to vote. So I thought if they were able to see what I saw — maybe it would help them make a decision.”
The 153-page memoir, titled “TRUMP FIRST: How the President and his associates turned their backs on me and my family,” traces Parnas’ journey from an enthusiastic Trump supporter in 2016 — he even volunteered for the campaign in Florida — to an eager Biden voter in 2020.
But unlike other ex-Trump allies who have since turned on the president and written books about it — like former national security adviser John Bolton, former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor (a.k.a. “Anonymous”), and former Trump communications director Omarosa Manigault Newman — Parnas describes spending far more time in Trump’s Washington hotel and its swanky steakhouse than in the White House.
But the picture that emerges is arguably as instructive as the insider accounts about policymaking in Trump’s Washington. In the first chapter, Parnas describes sitting in on a phone call between Republican Congressman Pete Sessions — who is running for reelection in Texas — and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as they attempted, from a private room on the second floor of BLT Prime, to negotiate a back-channel deal for Maduro to leave Venezuela and travel to the U.S. peacefully.
“Maduro jokingly replied: ‘I want to watch the Dallas Cowboys,’” Parnas writes.
In a nod to the group’s concerns about its unofficial talks being exposed, Parnas describes Sessions as being so worried about the CIA possibly listening in on the call that the Texas lawmaker said he’d be discarding his phone afterward.
