Government, Law Schools

Recent Law School Graduate, Who Happens To Be Son Of Lev Parnas, Writes Tell-All Book About Trump-Ukraine Scandal

He's got quite the story to tell after witnessing many of the meetings that led to Trump's impeachment.

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Back in 2017, we learned of a teenage wunderkind who would be attending law school at the tender age of 18. He’d dreamed of going to law school since he was just 10 years old, and he had political aspirations for the presidency after a career in corporate law. As it turns out, this teenager got his foot in the door of the political realm sooner than he ever could have imagined. His name is Aaron Parnas, and his surname sounds familiar because he’s the son of Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s associates who was involved in the Trump-Ukraine scandal that ultimately led to the president’s impeachment.

The younger Parnas, a 2020 graduate of George Washington University Law School who recently took the bar exam, now has a tell-all book for sale about what he witnessed, called “TRUMP F1RST: How the President and his associates turned their backs on me and my family.” In the book, Parnas details almost three years of his experiences and the backchannel deals that led to his father’s arrest, writing that he “saw a different side of President Donald Trump and his administration—one scarier than the average person could imagine.”

Parnas sat down for an interview with POLITICO, where he spoke about his father’s work with Giuliani, and it sounds like there was a fair amount of bumbling going on.

Despite their attempts to operate secretly, the group was highly indiscrete: In Chapter 10, Parnas describes listening in on a phone call Toensing and diGenova had with Attorney General William Barr about the couple’s client, Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash. Barr was put on speakerphone without his knowledge, Parnas writes.

“It was weird how comfortable they were with me being at these meetings,” Parnas said in the interview. “I didn’t have any foreign policy or government experience. I was like a fly on the wall.” He writes that “the first shadow diplomacy campaign to assist the Trump presidency that my father was part of” dated all the way back to Trump’s inauguration, when he says Lev participated in a number of high-level meetings with individuals close to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan as they attempted to forge a relationship with the new administration.

Parnas’s father is still embroiled in a legal battle in the wake of his arrest, and this book contains some money quotes that could very well be used in his defense. Take this one, for example (which smacks of what Michael Cohen once said of Trump):

It was clear to me that everything the Mayor and my father did through the summer months of 2019 related to Ukraine and the Bidens was done at the direction and with the consent of President Trump.

Parnas — who went from being a Trump supporter in 2016 to being a Biden voter in 2020 — says he was inspired to write this book for the benefit of young Republicans and young people in general who might not vote in the upcoming election. “I thought if they were able to see what I saw — maybe it would help them make a decision.”

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The son of Lev Parnas offers one more Trump tell-all [POLITICO]

Earlier: This Teenager Is About To Take The Law School World By Storm

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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