On with Kara Swisher - Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

How did a Ukrainian-born hustler help former President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter to influence the 2020 presidential election – a scheme that ultimately led to Trump's first impeachment? That's the question behind ‘From Russia with Lev’, a new doc from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that follows Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American from a less-than-savory background, who paid his way into the former president’s inner circle in 2016 and quickly became Trump’s “Ukraine guy.” Kara sits down with Maddow and director Billy Corben to discuss how Parnas gained access to then-POTUS Trump; the mission to take down Hunter Biden; Parnas’ role in the ousting of former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch; and how he eventually came out on the other side of it all. Vote for Kara as Best Host in the Current Events for Signal’s Listener’s Choice Awards here: https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2024/shows/craft/best-host-current-events  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, I'm talking to Rachel Maddow and Billy Corbin about their new film, From Russia with Lev. It documents how Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American hustler from Brighton Beach, wormed his way into Donald Trump's inner circle

and then got sent to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden. If you paid any attention to the first Trump impeachment trial, you probably remember Lev's name and know a little bit about his story. But believe me, if you haven't seen this documentary, you don't know the half of it. While the documentary is actually very funny and Lev Parnas is quite a character, it's also terrifying that our nation is being run by people like this and people like this that hire people like this. Particularly the freelance efforts

of an entirely incompetent Rudy Giuliani will make you shiver in fright at what's coming next if Trump gets back in office. Rachel Maddow, who's been on the show before, is the executive producer of the film. And in case you haven't heard of her, she's also the host of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, the author of multiple bestselling books, including Prequel, An American Fight Against Fascism,

and the host of four award-winning podcasts. Her latest, Ultra, season two, is excellent, and we talked about it, as I said, on my podcast earlier this summer. I recommend this podcast to everybody. It's critical to understand what's happening now by looking at history, and the resonances are enormous. You should listen to our conversation if you haven't already about it. And while you're at it, make sure to subscribe to On with Kara Swisher to get these episodes every Monday and Thursday. My second guest today is Billy Corbin, an Emmy, Peabody, and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning filmmaker. His films include an astonishing one, God Forbid, the sex scandal that brought down a dynasty about the relationship between Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becky Falwell,

and a hotel pool boy, that's right, and, of course, the Cocaine Cowboys franchise, which document the rise and fall of America's biggest drug kingpins. You can watch this latest film from Corbyn and Maddow from Russia with Lev on NBC.com by logging in with your TV provider with additional airings on MSNBC to come. It's hopefully going to a streamer, but it's well worth your time. Our expert question for this episode comes from Anne Applebaum, a writer at The Atlantic magazine and one of the smartest thinkers on Russia and Ukraine. And one more thing, I've been nominated for the best host in the Signal Listener's Choice Awards.

If you agree, you can vote at vote.signal.com or follow the link in the show notes. Vote early and often, as I like to say, and so does Donald Trump. All right, let's get to it. Rachel and Billy, thank you so much for coming on on. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Cara. So, Rachel, I want to start with your entry point into this story. In January of 2020, in the middle of the impeachment trial,

Lev Parnas sat down for an interview on your MSNBC show, made a series of bombshell accusations. Take us behind the scenes and tell us how you got the interview and then walk us through the allegations and how you vetted them because he was also a con man. Yeah. It was one of the weirder interview arrivals sort of that I've had, first of all, I mean, I had been covering the Giuliani scam and whatever was going on with this Ukraine thing, I think more intensively than other people. And part of the reason, just to be honest, is that I had kind of made characters on the show, recurring characters of Lev and Igor. And I would call, oh, it's Lev and Igor. I put them on the screen. I call them my boyfriends. And once you kind of established characters like that,

you can use shorthand for them. It's easier to tell those stories. So I'd covered them a lot. But then we got this call that he, after he was arrested, that he was willing to talk to me. And it was just, it was a terrible idea from his perspective. I mean, you don't, there's a reason you don't talk to people once they're indicted and before they go on trial. It's terrible for their legal defense. So I wanted to make sure that he had a lawyer and that he was taking advice. This seemed like a terrible idea. We spoke to his lawyer. The lawyer assured us that he wanted to do the interview, but the lawyer would be sitting there and probably Lev wouldn't say much. The lawyer would do the whole thing. probably Lev wouldn't say much. The lawyer would do the whole thing. But then we sat down and did the interview, and the lawyer didn't talk at all. Lev talked the whole time, and it was just bombshell after bombshell after bombshell. It was terrible for him legally, but it was amazing for me journalistically. Right, absolutely. I mean, I would be like, fine, I don't really care if you, you worry about things like that. I'm like, fine, if you want to talk, talk. But when you think about when they're saying things, though, you have to be very careful about what they're saying.

Because, again, as I said, this guy, of all things that come through, he's a con man, right? He's a salesman now, I would say. He's moved from con man to salesman. And how do you vet that? I mean, the big, I think, the big story of Lev, in addition to who he is as a human and what he was involved in, is that he did document everything. And so that was, in the course of producing that interview, there's a reason I didn't do it live. I taped it so that we could make sure that I was not saying things or presenting things on the air that were going to be unverified or unverifiable. And we took the receipts that he had, which was essentially,

you know, I'd ask him if he knew a certain politician, and then he'd show me a picture of himself with that politician. I'd ask him if he was in communication with ex-Justice Department official. He'd show me texts with that official. I mean, it was just the things that he put himself on the record as having done and the contacts that he had made it a different level of story because it meant that he was a much bigger legal threat to the people he was accusing than just a PR threat for saying things that he couldn't back up in an interview. Billy, I've read that you and your producing partners saw the interview and immediately recognized Lev as a quintessential Florida man.

You've been making films about Florida criminals and drug dealers for years. Explain what it means to be a quintessential Florida man and how Lev fits that mold. Well, it was so much more than just being a quintessential Florida man. It was this favorite genre we have of Florida men behaving badly with international implications. It's a butterfly effect story, right? A Florida man misbehaves and suddenly the entire fate of the world has changed. We did it with God Forbid, the sex scandal that brought down a dynasty in Hulu and how this alleged cuckold threesome between Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becky, and a former pool boy from the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami Beach. Every time I say that out loud, I take a moment to realize. I'm still getting over cuckold. I don't know.

Yes, cuckold. That had to become a part of my vocabulary for a while. But the how and how that may have of the United States, Donald Trump. And I'm reminded of when George W. Bush nominated Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court because she was the closest lawyer to his office. And this was kind of a similar thing. Rudy's like, who do I know who's Ukrainian, who is morally dubious and would be willing to do just about anything we say? And you have to remember that Lev and Igor's in to this world was a cynical one. It was a financial motive. Lev was not political. He was not registered to vote. He didn't even vote in 2016 as he financially assisted candidate Trump. And so that was why he initially got involved. Once he got involved, he really thought he was Trump's plumber. He was a true believer, like some of my friends down in

Miami who got mixed up with doing the wrong things for what they felt were the right reasons. I think Lev was one of those characters. Right. But at one point, Parnas said he could relate to Trump because he recognized him as a New York hustler, which, you know, many people think of that. But is Donald Trump also a quintessential Florida man? Because he's kind of both. And what characteristics does he share? Because ultimately, the character that's in the center of this is Donald Trump.

Absolutely. Even though he's not spoken to, you hear from him. So what characteristics does he share with either New York mobsters or Florida drug campaigns? Both. I think a lot of people flippantly refer to Donald Trump as a con man. But remember, I flippantly refer to Donald Trump as a con man, but remember, con is short for confidence. I don't believe that he exudes or instills much confidence. Quite the contrary. I think everybody knows, including his supporters, that he is much more akin to a religious charlatan who is exploiting people of faith or a cult leader. And that's what Lev fell into. He fell into what he what's the term that he coins? I was cultinized and then subsequently decultinized.

Lev doesn't know he made up that word, but he made up that word. And yet it makes perfect, perfect sense. And I think that, you know, I always say that LA is where you go when you want to be somebody. New York is where you go when you are somebody. And Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else. It's always been a sunny place for shady people. And Lev Parnas took that route. And lo and behold, Donald Trump before him took that route as well and settled in Mar-a-Lago where he found a town. This is what happens when people move from San Francisco. We saw this in the pandemic and Chicago and New York to Miami. They're not coming there because they want to contribute to community or be a part of something that they think is better.

It's because they couldn't buy the government they wanted in the places that they came from. So cult leader or religious, charismatic religious leader or a political charlatan? I think that on the political side of it, I think part of the cult feeling is that he's offering something that is not politics. He's saying, if I am in charge, then politics is over. And instead, we will have, I mean, if you're J.D. Vance, you put it really slickly and you say,

we'll have common sense. If you're Donald Trump, you say it in your messianic way, I alone can fix it. You won't have to vote anymore. You won't have to think about these things anymore. Once and for all, we will vanquish our enemies. So he's offering this transcendence. Right. A little Huey Long, right? I mean, that kind of thing. Huey Long, but also, you know, also a sort of monarchical thing. I mean, there's a reason that his supporters joke around

that, you know, they can't wait for Barron. You know, they can't wait for, maybe Don Jr. isn't going to be the right one. It's certainly not going to be Eric, but Barron's already six foot eight. We're ready for him. I mean, they want it to be, they want politics to be over

and just to be in the hands of the strongman. And that ready for him. I mean, they want politics to be over and just to be in the hands of the strongman. And that's a crossover, I think, between a sort of messianic religious and messianic political. Which in the documentary, you know, the way that Lev looked up to Trump in a way that was almost religious, you know, the way that smiles that he did. It wasn't just for adjacency, I think. It was something else that was going on. So, we know he started on this documentary. Let's talk about Lev's origin story. Rachel, you first. Where did he grow up? How did he come in the world? How did he get to Trump, and what was he doing? He had nothing to do with politics at all. He came over to this country, lived in Brooklyn. His father was involved. His family

was involved. His associates were involved in, as he puts it, Russian organized crime. He was not going to school, not working a normal job. He was hauling cash around for... A bag man. He was a bag man for the organized crime. And he was super cute, but he was a bad guy. And he went from there into boiler room penny stock fraud, which was very lucrative for him. And also the law hot on his heels the whole time. The places that he was working at kept getting shut down. He went back to the former Soviet Union and did import-export with, you know, every red flag in the world.

export, which, you know, every red flag in the world. He, by his own admission, said that, you know, he was, you know, he made good friends with this guy, Igor, and Igor's, one of Igor's business was called Mafia Rave. That was a nightclub. Like, this is not a very above board guy. He gets, goes, ends up in Florida doing the same boiler room penny stock fraud stuff and starts having, among other things, his personal financial disasters start sort of sticking to him. And that leads to a very interesting and important part of the story, as told in the documentary, where this great Haitian-American lawyer, who's the cutest little bug's butt in the world, Tony, ends up basically attaching himself to him and finding Lev and documenting Lev's financial life in a way to try to collect for one of his debtors.

And that ends up being important in terms of building the feds ultimately, building a case against him. Which brings him down. It's a totally separate case from Trump. Yeah, it's a financial case. Right. He meets Trump just as Access Hollywood tape gets leaked, so a weak moment in Trump's life.

And he warms his way into the inner circle. Billy, is it possible because problems are abandoning Trump after the tape? Or, as people know, you can buy your way into friendship with Trump. He's very cheap. He comes cheap. See Elon Musk, for example. It's not that much money he's giving him of the money he's got. So talk a little bit about how he got in there because, you know,

all manner of – it's happening with Eric Adams in New York. All manner of people can just show up with a check and worm their way into these circles. Imagine my shock being from Miami and hearing that a mayor is getting indicted and it is not. Yeah. Yeah. So I, you, you hit it on the head, which is that Lev being, having fled Soviet Ukraine in his childhood with his family, of course, had an innate skepticism of government. They did not trust government. They created their own government,

as he explains it in Little Odessa, in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Russian organized crime is how he, as Rachel said, ultimately described it. And so he believed that government, like everything else in life, was transactional. And so his plan was to buy his way into power. And many politicians are very simply for sale. And Donald Trump was no different, particularly at that very sensitive time late in the 2016 election, when many from his party were abandoning him. And Lev became a part

of a very small fraternity of wealthy Floridians, Palm Beachites, neighbors of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, who became part of the entourage. And that first fundraiser that Lev went to, I think donated $50,000 personally from himself. This is before Igor was involved with him again. He had a moment with Donald Trump there at this gorgeous palatial nine-figure estate in Palm Beach waterfront where there was nobody else there, really. It was a very small group. And so Lev had a real access and was doing a Q&A. Trump was doing a Q&A and Lev hijacked it, which he is wont to do. And they talked for like a half hour, the two of them.

And everybody was kind of like, well, what is happening here? Everyone kind of witnessed this bromance, this meet cute budding there. And his wife Svetlana, recognized it. And other people, in fact, that was the first time he ever met Rudy Giuliani. And people were like, okay, well, this guy is not only a source of money, but he seems to have a rapport with Trump that was special and unique. Right, which is critical, which is critical. Now, in Florida politics,

Which is critical. Now, in Florida politics, most two-bit hustlers can worm their way into the echelons of power. He was close to also Ron DeSantis, as long as there's money to donate. Rachel, is this a Florida problem, a Republican problem? How do you look at it? Because it is kind of astonishing how close he got so quickly. Yeah, I mean, it's maybe a Florida story, but it's not a Florida problem. I mean, he's also, you know, his relationship with Kevin McCarthy, his relationship with Pete Sessions, his relationship with Devin Nunez, his relationship, you know, it's all of these guys. And they had ended up on the Republican side of the ledger because that's where they thought that their $50,000 checks, their donations, were going to buy them the influence they needed to run a few different business ideas that they had. One involving an energy company in Ukraine. Oh, weird. Where did that idea come from? One involving the marijuana business. They had this idea that if they could buy themselves the right friends, which they felt among the Republican politicians they were meeting, it was an open door for that, then they could get the business deals that they needed, you know, former Soviet Union style. And there was nothing that happened. Once they started doing that, once they started writing those checks, there was nothing that happened in Republican politics that disabused them of that knowledge. They believed that it was working. Right. And it was a daisy chain,

a daisy chain of influences as they moved up the chain. So he's then on a first name basis with Trump World. And he's not donating his own money, to be clear. He's donating money that comes from Igor. It starts with his own money, but it ends up being Igor's money when it's big numbers. Igor's money, who has mafia rave, who has more sort of dirty money, essentially. So he's on a first-name basis with these Trump people, and I know who's who. And he and his business partner slash accomplice Igor got invited

to a private dinner with Trump hosted, which is a wonderful section of the documentary, by America First Super PAC committing a million dollars to the PAC. And Igor somehow secretly videotapes the dinner, which must have been thrilling for you, Billy, as a documentary filmmaker. How did they, how often did they videotape encounters and do it without getting caught?

And why? Why would be, you know, selfies I can see, but this was something very different. And had that versimilitude of having a phone that you're moving around trying not to be seen. This is the wonderful advantage of kind of a postmodern documentary filmmaking in true crime filmmaking, which is that the criminals are now documenting

their crimes in real time, which is extremely helpful when it comes time to make the documentary, because, of course, they have their own B-roll. And Lev and Igor, as Rachel said, documented everything. The text messages are most copious. But why? Why was he documenting the video? What caused him to do that? Oh, I think it was ego more than anything. It was, as you said, the selfie, the addiction to

selfies. It was the proximity to power. It was the pride of it. Lev was posting as you said, the selfie, the addiction to selfies. It was the proximity to power. It was the pride of it. Lev was posting, and Igor, onto social media, not that video, for example, but the selfies with all of these, all of MAGA world, really. And he was impressing upon the Russian-Ukrainian community that he had access. And that gave him access. And he was an in. He had an in. Let me show you this, right? Yeah, And it gave him access to money and financing. That's how Igor found his

way back to him and was literally financing every element of his lifestyle at that point. And what it also showed us how ignorant Trump was, as you're saying, let's play some of the film. We're going to hear a sound of this video that Lev secretly recorded plus commentary. First, Trump reacts with amazement when he finds out Ukraine has oil, and then they talk about the American ambassador to Ukraine. Let's listen to the clip. When Trump saw us, he greeted us like he always greeted us by saying, my guys, to me and Igor. Igor secretly recorded the whole thing. All of a sudden, the topic changes to Ukraine. Me being me, I got into the conversation. How's Ukraine doing? Don't ask me.

They love you though. I realize that Trump has no idea about Ukraine. How long has Ukraine lasted in a fight with Russia? I don't think very long. Without us, not very long. He has no idea they have oil. Ukraine has oil? Of course. Number one in Europe. Ukraine? Yes. So prior to us coming to the event, I heard all these stories about what was going on with the Ukrainian ambassador and that how she was, you know, a Soros plant and how she was part of the Clinton regime. The first thing that came out of my mouth is I said,

The biggest problem there, I think, is we got to get rid of the ambassador. She's still left over from the Clinton administration. Who are the ambassador? Are you Ukraine? I'm repeating gossip. I have no idea. I have no facts, no vetting. She's basically walking around telling everybody, wait, he's going to get impeached. He got angry all of a sudden, turned around to one of his aides and said, get wherever, okay? Get around the room. Take her out, okay? It was silence. The table looked at each other. Nobody knew what to do. Do it. So no vetting, just hearing from Lev, just in a very mobster fashion.

So it's a window into his ignorance and decision-making process at the same time, a tough guy kind of thing. Rachel, I'd like you to reflect on that exchange, because this is decision-making by Trump. The last person who told him something, who had no vetting, he just did it, largely because he was hurt by the fact that maybe she did something to him, I think. The thing to me that is amazing about that exchange, especially as you hear Lev sort of narrate it and say, I'm just repeating gossip. Well, where is he hearing gossip that Marie Yovanovitch is bad? Marie Yovanovitch is a Well, where is he hearing gossip that Marie Yovanovitch is bad? Marie Yovanovitch is a esteemed career U.S. diplomat who's very skilled, who's working in a country that is an important ally to us that, European-based allied nation. And so it's a sensitive country. She's a very skilled diplomat, and she is

doing the right things for the U.S. government. A career diplomat, a career, not a political appointee. And of course, who are Lev's contacts in Ukraine from whom he is getting dirt, made-up stuff that's not true about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, right? He's getting stuff from bad guys in Ukraine. And bad guys in Ukraine, understandably, would want a career stand-up U.S. straight-arrow diplomat like that out of there. They'd much prefer to have, you know, some Trump world crony or nobody or somebody who wasn't going to be in their way. And so he's in circles where, yeah, you'd want somebody who represented straight up American good governance out of the way. He conveys that to Trump and Trump instantly with no vetting, with not even understanding how to spell Ukraine is like, oh, yes.

Still doesn't know they make oil. Yeah. We should, oh, you, my mobster lackey, says that we should get rid of America's chief diplomat in the region? Sure, sure we do. I mean, the thing about corruption is that it not only says something important about the politician who is being corrupted, it also allows the person who is corrupting the politician or who's engaged in corrupt behavior with them to become a big mocker, right? And so you empower

the worst people in the world by giving them access to people with lots of power. And so Lev then becomes a big deal in terms of Ukraine and sway because he's got corrupt access to Trump through his checkbook. And just suggesting things. Now, Lev becomes personal friends with Trump's attorney, the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. So when Giuliani asked Lev and his buddy Igor to go to Ukraine, look for dirt on Hunter Biden, he jumps at the chance. So before we go into details, explain that this is not how people normally conduct foreign affairs for the United States of America. Correct, Billy? will normally conduct foreign affairs for the United States of America. Correct, Billy? This is the reality show foreign policy of a reality show president.

Yes, that's correct. That's what this is. And as evidenced by that audio recording as well, that this is how the worst of what you think was going on in the Trump administration was happening. And even worse than that, the way business was being conducted. Svetlana, Lev's wife, makes the point very clearly in the documentary that had this been a Hillary Clinton administration, a Barack Obama administration, a Joe Biden administration. George Bush administration. Yeah. Yeah. He says normal people, I think is what she says. Any normal person would not have had anyone like Lev within 5,000 miles of the White House, let alone the President of the United States and his private

attorney who is being retained for the purpose of maintaining attorney-client privilege between really his very small collection of clients, Donald Trump, Lev and Igor. And so this turns into this kind of caper. That's exactly what this is. Or to paraphrase John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani's drug dealer, however you want to refer to what was going on there. That was in a different context, but I think it applies to this scenario as well. Well, freelance diplomacy off to the side, right, by incompetent people. Freelance is very polite. And it's not just that it's stupid or incompetent or unprofessional or embarrassing. It's also that. Which it is. All of which it is, and hilarious, all of which it is. But it's also Russia. I mean, what happens is that Russia, as Lev comes to realize,

happens is that Russia, as Lev comes to realize, every single person who fed them what they were asking to be fed, which was supposed dirt on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, was connected to Russia and Russian intelligence. Because you go over there and you say, hey, I'm looking for this thing that'll help Trump, and I'm, you know, and you know me through our organized crime connections and all this stuff. And so the Kremlin, which has, you know, has made a decade-long project of doing everything it can to help Donald Trump and to, you know, to try to dismantle the U.S. system of government, they see the floodgates are open and then they fill them. Right. They're a mark. They're a mark. They're essentially a mark. So they're not the con men are getting con, the very incompetent con men, actually.

But let's talk about Svetlana, who is not incompetent. She's Lev's third wife, the star of the documentary. I'm sorry. She's fantastic. She really jumps out. She also calls herself fourth baby mama, as she puts it. She told Lev, this is a terrible idea. And her disdain for her husband in a loving way was really what was so charming.

She was charming, smart, the only person who seems to have common sense. Talk about her and why she was unable to persuade Lev. I don't know what she was doing there. I was like, what are you married to this guy for kind of thing. Talk a little bit about that, Billy, first, then Rachel. Yeah, I think you're right. I think she steals the show. And one of my favorite tweets, I think there was multiple tweets who arrived at this conclusion, having watched the

documentary, which is the moral of the story is, had he listened to his wife, none of this would have happened, which really, really is the moral of the story, I think. And, you know, they have a very, you know, she also, her family fled the Soviet Union, Ukrainian Jew, and she has a very traditional view of marriage. How else to explain the fact that they're still married? Yes. How else? I want you to explain that, one of you. He certainly has done everything he possibly could to alienate her and their children and his entire family, all of his children.

He's always in a strip bar. He's always in a strip bar in those pictures. FYI. Always overseas and always in the power going to his head the way it was. You know, Lord knows what was happening in Ukraine and Vienna and Paris and Israel and everywhere they were going on behalf of Rudy Giuliani. Lord knows. I think we all know.

But go ahead. I know. were going on behalf of Rudy Giuliani. Yeah, Lord knows. I think we all know, but go ahead. And I think that that sense of tradition also extended to Lev's kind of patriarchal attitude as well. And so he was like, you know, I know best and I'm doing things for this family and I'm doing things for this country and I'm bringing us pride and I'm bringing us money. And I think that he just, he was unreachable. There's a moment where Svetlana says like, oh, we're not getting him back people when she was kind of relaying what was occurring back in those lost years of Lev. So what I don't know is how they endured. When I say I don't know, I know. I just don't quite understand, to be perfectly honest. But he was lost. His family didn't—there was a time in which his family didn't matter to him.

And I think he discovered, as many people do in a cell, you know, blocked off from the world, that maybe his family was the most important thing after all. Because they do throw caution to the wind with Igor, and he heads off to his work husband, I guess, to Ukraine to find anything they can slime Joe Biden with, right? And Hunter is a perfect mark in that regard. He's on the board of Burisma, one of the largest energy producers in Ukraine. I don't know if you heard, but Ukraine does oil, Donald Trump told me. Well, I don't know if you heard, but Ukraine does oil, Donald Trump told me. While Biden was acting as the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine, they never found any evidence and no one ever has. But is it fair to say we should expect more from political families?

It's not corrupt necessarily, but is it unethical for Hunter to have been there? Either one of you, the son of a vice president, to take a high paying,-show job at a huge energy producer from a country in his father's foreign policy portfolio. It certainly opens the Bidens up to that. Either one of you. Billy. I hate to both sides this or say that everybody does it, but certainly the families, extended families, friends of people in power trade on their access and trade on their name wherever possible. I think that what I believe that what we saw during the Trump administration was unprecedented. that came out of the woodwork because they recognized, perhaps like Lev did, a fellow New York hustler, as he put it, that there was going to be a uniquely permissive environment in which they could exploit, whether it was the public trough or the private trough, by leveraging their access to the public trough. Everybody seemed to get in on it.

their access to the public trough. Everybody seemed to get in on it. That includes Trump's entire family. That includes his son-in-law, certainly. And that includes characters like Lev and Igor, who were able to get closer to this president than anybody ever could. And interestingly, Lev made the point that Rudy Giuliani did not get paid by Donald Trump. And that was in classic Trump style because Trump was like, well, I know you're going out there and selling your access to me or trading on my name to get other clients and lobbying clients and legal clients. So I should be getting a piece of what you're getting from them. I get a VIG. I should get a VIG. Exactly. The mobster term is V vig, but go ahead.

I was going to say vig, but I let you say it. But that was the attitude. I know you're exploiting me. I should be exploiting you. So that's how you're getting paid, Rudy. You're getting paid from those other people who are only hiring you because of your relationship and access to me. Right. Jared Kushner certainly built up a big investment portfolio with lots of foreign money. Wow.

Because he's really smart, that's why. While he's serving in the White House, Qatar comes in and bails out his family real estate firm from the terrible purchase decision. from the terrible purchase decision. And while he's in the White House, he sets up his new investment firm, which gets $2 billion from sovereign wealth funds in other countries. And then turns out, years later, just reported in the New York Times recently,

it's paid no fees. So just the way things are. But Hunter does the same thing. But Hunter Biden was not in the White House. I think it's important to make that distinction. Jared Kushner was in the White House and was unqualified for a security clearance. But that was overridden by his father-in-law, the president, and he was able to trade on that. I think that's a big difference between Hunter Biden and some of these other characters.

Still not good. I would say not good to be in this position. Hunter did put his family in an awkward position, I would say, at the very least. Oh, terrible. I think he would tell you that. We'll be back in a minute. Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from NetSuite. Thank you. writing yet. And if you run a business, the lessons would be even more valuable. You could ride the waves of market volatility and customer sentiment effortlessly. Unfortunately, that's never going to happen. But switching to NetSuite by Oracle might be the next best thing. NetSuite is the go-to business management suite for almost 40,000 companies offering everything you need to

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So Rachel, Leviniger is supposed to find dirt on Hunter Biden, who puts himself in the harm's way. He definitely does. They're also parting it up, running up huge bills at strip clubs. So many pictures of strip clubs. Does the State Department know what they're doing? Can they do anything after all the Secretary of State is Mike Pompeo, a very, you know, not a guy I would see at a strip club necessarily. So what, do they know what they're up to? Does, he should be running foreign policies, Mike Pompeo and the people that work for him. Yeah, and technically there's a law against American citizens doing foreign policy in ways that are contrary to the interests of the U.S. government. It does seem like the State Department was aware that this was going on in part because there's evidence that they followed Levin, Igor, and Rudy around and cleaned up after them. So whenever they would take a meeting with somebody in the Ukrainian government or somebody

in Ukrainian intelligence or whoever it was who they were trying to get this scam pulled off with, then the U.S. State Department, the actual U.S. government, would follow up and say, whatever they told you to do, please don't do it. And so they created a perception among powerful people abroad that the U.S. had a real government and also a shadow government, thus creating a dilemma for people who are trying to get the U.S. government to do something. Well, do I talk to the con men, the guys with the open shirts and the gold chains? Because they seem to think that they're speaking. Because that's Rudy Giuliani. And they seem to have the president on speed dial. Or do I talk to these bureaucrats who do not have names anybody has heard of, who don't

have a relationship with the president, and who just seem to have the official imprimatur of the U.S. government, but maybe that doesn't mean anything anymore? I mean, the damage that they did to us in our relations with other countries' sensitive allies is still resonating. So Zelensky gets elected president and Giuliani tells Lev to meet with Zelensky, incredible, give him an ultimatum. He wants Mike Pence's inauguration. He wants military aid. He has to announce an investigation to Burisma and Hunter Biden. This is really one of the most compelling parts of the film because you realize how ridiculous this entire thing is. It has

occupied so much of our tax dollars and attention and everything else. Talk a little bit about Zelensky, Billy, and then he blows Lev and Igor off, and then Trump takes things in his own hands. So talk about this part of it because that was the most astonishing. That was a pay-per-play moment. You know, that's a nice business you got there. Hate to lose it kind of thing. So important to note that because politically conscious people are aware of the so-called perfect phone call, as Donald Trump dubbed it, that he had with Vladimir Zelensky in the wake of all of this episode that you're asking me about now. But Zelensky was the second successive Ukrainian president that Trump and Rudy, through Lev and Igor, attempted to, I don't want to call it a shakedown because Poroshenko was not. It was more of a, you know, do us this favor in exchange for access to Trump in the White House.

And funny enough, Poroshenko laughed in Lev's face. Lev got a meeting with the former president of Ukraine prior to Zelensky's predecessor, and he laughed in Lev's face because he had been, the way he said, was screwed by Donald Trump on some coal deal that he was forced into overpaying for coal from some Pennsylvania company, the way he tells it. And he never got the pro quo that Trump had promised him. So he goes, I'm not doing this again, but if you want to talk to our prosecutor general or somebody, maybe we can do something for you and announce this fake investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Now, what happens with Zelensky, to his credit, is he's now the president-elect at this time of Ukraine. And he's trying to turn the page

on what was undoubtedly a notoriously corrupt time in the history of Ukraine and a tenuous relationship that they had with the world, which was very damaging to their conflict with Russia, which really started in 2014. And even though we think of it as a more recent event, Russia had occupied part of Ukraine for now a decade, basically. And so he's looking to improve relations with the world. And as Lev said, we're there claiming we're fighting corruption while attempting to corrupt them to the max, remarkably, and to Zelensky's credit, under remarkable duress. He does not entertain this. And Levin hindsight realizes that Zelensky, who we thought was corrupt and corruptible,

was actually not as corrupt, certainly as Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump were. And in fact, as he puts it, in classic mob terms, was a stand-up guy. And amazingly, the perfect phone call is as a result in classic, again, mob fashion. The boss going, I sent you guys to do this, and you screwed the whole thing up, and now I got to step in and do it myself. And that's what Trump does on that phone call. Yeah, that nice accent. Yeah, on the phone call, this is where Colonel Vindman turned him in. No,

it was good. Colonel Vindman, who's working for the NSC, blows a whistle on the call. We know how the story ends. Trump gets impeached and ultimately not convicted. Rachel, Levy was blocked from testifying at the impeachment. What happened there? Do you think that testing would have made any difference? I doubt it, but... Yeah, I mean, now that we know that that was the first of two impeachments and we know how they both went down, I don't think that Republicans in Congress were ever going to use the impeachment process to significantly discipline Trump no matter what. So I don't know. I mean, maybe him testifying live would have made a difference. That said, the people who did testify live were stunning. I mean, hearing from Ambassador

Yovanovitch, hearing from Colonel Vindman. I mean, remember, that's Colonel Vindman giving that indelible testimony about how his father said, you know, in America, bad things aren't going to happen to you, you can speak the truth here. And then as soon as the impeachment effort fails, not only Colonel Vindman, but his twin brother, they both get frog-marched out of the White House and lose their jobs. And so, yeah, bad things do happen to you when crooks run the U.S. government. It turns out that when the U.S. government fails and is taken over by what seems more like a small-time sort of two-bit comic mob operation, yeah, bad things happen. fact-finding exercise and documented so much of what happens. But I think the really damning thing about it is to know that no criminal charges, no criminal investigation ever followed the factual revelations of the impeachment process. So all of this stuff was proven. I mean, we've just made a film showing the receipts for all of this stuff. And Rudy Giuliani was never prosecuted as a foreign agent. He very clearly was a foreign agent. And among all the other crimes that we saw, that we have full record of,

and that's a function of the corruption of the Justice Department during Trump's presidency. We'll be back in a minute. Support for On with Karis Fisher comes from Anthropic. You can probably benefit from incorporating AI into your daily workflow. It doesn't matter if you're an entrepreneur trying to get a new idea off the ground or the CFO of a multinational corporation. AI is a powerful tool worth harnessing. But exactly how do you get started?

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That's glean.com slash Cara for 15% off. Glean, work AI for all. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.

That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,

we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim.

And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. what you think you learned more broadly about the relationship between and maybe the similarities between Trump world, the business community that Trump lived and worked in, and the business

community of Russia, of Moscow, the world surrounding Putin? What did they have in common? What did they learn from one another? And maybe what were they trying to accomplish together? Oh, and Applebaum is so smart. That's a really good question. So, Rachel, go ahead. Well, you know, I'm not an expert in Trump's early business stuff because I just find it,

it just feels repetitive and salacious. And it's all infected by the kind of press that he got as he was coming up in New York real estate, which was so credulous and tabloidy. It makes me nauseous. But what you glean from the way that he came up through business is that might makes right, that it doesn't matter if it was illegal or you were not allowed to do it. You have done it.

And then when you go on and move on to other things, who's going to hold you to account for having done it if you were so brash to do it in the first place? That shows you can. It's a sort of might makes right thing. And when Trump was running for office, running for presidency, and simultaneously, When Trump was running for office, running for presidency, and simultaneously, secretly signing a letter of intent to build Trump Tower Moscow while saying, I have no business interests in Moscow, I think it's the same sort of thought. You know, yeah, I'm not supposed to be doing this, and I'm going to lie about this because clearly I recognize I should lie about it because this looks really bad.

But what are you going to do, stop me? Me being willing to do it shows that I'm willing to break the laws, which shows that the laws are not applicable to me. And so it's kind of a, it's a challenge to, it's a challenge to governance because they're so often right. I mean, if you gain power through illegal means, it's really hard then to say that the law should constrain you once you're in power. But that's the challenge to the U.S. system right now is to take somebody and say, yeah, you know, no matter what you've done, ultimately the system is stronger than you. What about you, Billy? are on the trail, if you will, in the Q&As, because I think of the conversation around democratic backsliding and looking at Putin or Fidel Castro or any kind of budding dictatorship.

And very often it begins with, if not checks and balances, certainly colleagues and partnerships and relationships that balance out the potential future autocrat. And Lev makes the point that as wild and reality show-like as the Trump administration part one seemed, there were checks and balances. There were some legit-ish statesmen that Mike Pompeo, for whatever you may think of him, did attempt to deter Trump's worst instincts and did try to, for example, slow walk the, or if not completely ignore the termination of Maria Vanovic. And Lev makes the point that any of those people, again, for whatever you may think of a John Bolton, they were there with some experience and wisdom to say no or play to Trump's ego in an effort to discourage his worst instincts and commands. And they're all gone now.

And that's what Lev says in a second Trump administration. Who will be the secretary of state? Trump administration, who will be the Secretary of State? Mike Flynn? Who will be the Attorney General? Kash Patel? These are the types of people who are left because everyone, either Trump doesn't trust them because they wouldn't listen to his every order, or nobody wants to be associated with this man and any future administration. Right. So let's talk about that. We're a month away from the election, except for this documentary. Nobody seems to remember or care about what he did here, right?

It didn't come up in the debates. Pollsters don't ask voters about it. It's a complete non-issue, and it's an astonishing story. Rachel, how is this possible? And what is it about Donald Trump that allows him to commit breathtaking acts of staggering corruption and keep going? I mean, his career started with racism, you know, keeping black people out of apartments. And it's just one thing on top of the next. But this is an astonishing and dangerous documentary, as funny as it is. By the way, I applaud it being funny,

because it's very funny. But it's not. It's, you know, as Kamala Harris said, in many ways he's an unserious person, but he's very dangerous. And that's what I was thinking of when I was watching this film. I mean, if you want your, you know, crime to be forgotten, commit a bigger one next. I mean, I think that's essentially what's happened is that it's such a firehose of scandal. I mean, let's talk about just within the last couple of months, the Washington Post published a story about how there's very credible and compelling, like, cinematically dramatic evidence that Trump took a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt, that Trump took a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt, where the Egyptian intelligence services took all of the U.S. currency that they had in Cairo,

put it in a box, and brought it over to Trump when he needed $10 million for his campaign. That wasn't even a one-day story. Trump hasn't, he hasn't released his tax returns, neither has J.D. Vance, by the way. He hasn't, you know, the second impeachment, it was about the January 6th thing, but this first impeachment about Ukraine, it's just, it's not memory hold. It's there. It's just that we can't sort of keep it, you know, front of mind with the latest scandalous worst thing that he said. It's also, I think, true that for his critics and for

objective observers of how dangerous he is, there is this thing, there's this nagging voice in the back of your head which says the people who like him won't care. And so because his acolytes are more like acolytes than voters, because it is this idea that he's this transcendent figure that's going to end politics and offer you some new form of future where he benevolently gives you all the things that you want. It's true that the scandal and the corruption and the pettiness and the incompetence does wash off them. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, not lose any voters. And so I think that that's a disincentive for people to cover it and tell

these stories because they think that the people who most love him won't care. I think that that's a disincentive for people to cover it and tell these stories because they think that the people who most love him won't care. I think that you need to fight against that because I am an optimist about human redemption. And I believe that people can be decultinized. And I believe that even— Such as love. Yes. Even people who are in the depths of it. If you give them true information and trust them as human beings and believe in the human capabilities of the human spirit, people can come out the other side of it. And so you have to find ways to keep

telling these stories, even with all the disincentives to do it. So let's get back just to end on Ukraine, because this is what this is about. It's a version of what Trump behaves, but it's about Ukraine. Trump might be elected president. Last time he tried to coerce Zelensky, Trump might be elected president. Last time he tried to coerce Zelensky, but Ukraine's now in a hot war with Russia. Trump recently mocked him at a campaign rally, Zelensky. He then met with him at Trump Tower. He said he had a good relationship with both pressed multiple times whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war, and he kept saying he wanted the war to end. I'd love you both to reflect. If Russia wins the war because Trump cuts off American military,

they would take a large piece of Ukraine. It's going to end exactly the way Lev set it up, right? In a way, what do you imagine a Trump presidency will mean for Ukraine having done this film? Billy, you first. I think it means really the end of Ukraine as we know it. I think that Trump will invariably put Zelensky in a position as, I mean, he's not the master negotiator that he has always claimed to be. What does he do? He doesn't pay his contractors or he leans

on vulnerable people. He punches down on people who cannot necessarily defend themselves. He's a bully is what he is. And so is Putin. And that's why I think he has a quote, good relationship with Putin. And I think we know very clearly. And I think he's been clear about where he would come down on that. This is very simple. If Putin pulls out of Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is over. But that is not going to be necessarily an outcome acceptable to Putin and certainly then won't be an outcome acceptable to Trump in his future. Trump Tower Moscow or whatever it is that he and Kushner have plotted. So I think it's not only a dreadful potential end for Ukraine,

it's a dreadful potential end to our relationship with our allies, as it very nearly was the first time, to the future of NATO, to any organizations and nations who have banded together to commit to peace since the Second World War. And I don't think you have a commander-in-chief in Donald Trump who appreciates, understands, or respects what it means to have those relationships that aren't simply based on shakedowns and bullying. Rachel? What Putin wants is what he calls a multipolar world. is what he calls a multipolar world.

And if Trump is elected president again, it'll be the end of Ukraine because he'll cut off support to Ukraine immediately. And without support from the United States, the Western support for Ukraine will not be enough to prop them up to be able to withstand what's going on with Russia. And that will mean that Russia then occupies Ukraine, which is a catastrophe for the people of Ukraine. It will also mean the collapse

of NATO. And one of the things that John Bolton has been very explicit about, including recently on Anne Applebaum's podcast, Autocracy in America, is that Trump had not just like ideation about ending NATO, he got very close to just announcing that America was pulling out of it. I don't think that he'll just get close. He will pull out of NATO, which will end NATO. And without NATO, we will have a multipolar world. We'll have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping free to invade whoever they want and to reestablish more of an empire than their individual countries. It'll be lights out for Taiwan. It'll be lights out for Ukraine.

And then it'll be lights out for the, you know, the countries that are, I mean, I'm sorry, Moldova, right? I'm sorry, Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Poland. I'm sorry, you know, there's no reason to think of those things as stopping. Sorry, you know, there's no reason to think of those things as stopping. Trump has said, you know, they can do whatever the hell they want to our NATO allies because he doesn't believe in NATO. And so you end up with the United States as a sort of Spanish-American war era regional backwater, ignoring the rest of the world and dictators taking over and the United States becoming that kind of a country because that's what he admires. It's very, very dark, and I think he wants to do it very, very fast, and J.D. Vance will be much better at accelerating that sort of a plan than Mike Pence ever could have been. All right, last quote. That's very dark, Rachel, obviously. That's okay. Sorry. I thought you were the optimist.

I know, yeah. I'm an optimist. I'm a cockeyed optimist. Not about dictators. Okay. So last question then. First, Billy, and then Rachel. How do you look at what you want your film to say now?

Because it has to resonate today. How do you look at what you're doing here? You're not just telling a funny caper story, are you? I think it's, regardless of what happens, or irregardless, as we say in Miami, because we're irreliterate, but I use it irironically. Regardless of what happens,

I think that this is an important historic document because, as you said, it got memory holds. Like, how are we not talking about the first impeachment of a president of the United States who was in fact impeached twice? How is that not a part of the history that we're discussing? Now I feel like we have contributed that to remind everyone about this episode and hopefully to change the conversation. As you've said, why are we not talking about this? It's absolutely insane. As Rachel often points out, I'm sorry, which impeachment of Trump is this? It gets very confusing sometimes to keep up with the firehose of fuckery, if you'll pardon my term.

No, that's fine. It's a very good fire hose. So, Rachel, last word. When you, in a lot of your books, you talk about heroes that show up, small people with small moments, the guy who knew all about franking, for example, in Ultra, or different people in prequel, prosecutors, journalists, things like that. In this case, given the stakes and where we are, the bad guys seem to be winning, right? It feels like that on some ways, you know, in terms of what would you like the impact of this to be? What would you hope for it? I think the commonality for me in all of these stories that I've been telling, and some of them as, you know, are sort of obscure things from history that I'm trying to bring back. Some are characters from history that I think have resonance in terms of

what we're contending with today, is to shine a light on people who stand up against stuff like this, whether they were involved as bad guys in the first case and were repentant, or whether they were crusaders against it from the beginning, and to show what their tactics are to try to fix problems like this and to stand up against tyrants and would-be dictators like this and corruption and crooks like this. But also to show that not one tactic usually works to take these guys down. Demagoguery is a recurrent thing in history and all over the world because demagogues are effective. Dictators are more the norm than democracy. But learning what it takes to stand up to them, seeing what it takes when you're, you know, what it's cost people like Lev. I mean, Lev has served time in prison.

Lev almost lost his family. Lev has been destroyed by this. destroyed by this. I hope that that makes us recognize the ways in which we all can fight against this, to recognize the nobility of the people who do wage these fights. I hope that these sort of stories encourage us to stand up for the people who wage these fights. I mean, people like Stormy Daniels, people like Lev Parnas, people like the historical heroes that you mentioned from the Ultra series and stuff, those are people who paid a personal price for, in some ways, saving this country or trying to save this country. And we should have their back, and we should support them, and we should

recognize the way that they're personally destroyed by these things and try to backstop them so that doesn't happen. There hasn't been a civil war over these kinds of things, right? We're not having mass violence. We're having individual people have their lives destroyed for trying to do the right thing. And the rest of us can try to mitigate some of that damage by recognizing their heroism and standing up for them. So, Lev is a hero. Lev is a hero, I think. I think Lev is a hustler and a bad guy who is also redeemable and redeemed. And his repentance is inspiring to me and makes me believe that anybody who is in the depths of this can come out of it. All right.

We'll end on that note. Thank you for a wonderful film. Everyone should watch this. You can watch Russia Would Love, just for people to know, on NBC.com by logging in with your TV provider. Additional airings on MSNBC to come. Thank you so much. Cara, thank you. It was a great conversation.

Of course. Absolutely. I really appreciate it. It's a wonderful film, Billy. You make great films. You make terrific films. Thank you. On with Cara Swisher is produced by

Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakam, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher, Kate Furby, and Kaylin Lynch. Our engineers are Rick Kwan, Fernando Arruda, and Aaliyah Jackson. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're a Svetlana. And trust me, she is the best part of this documentary. If not, take a vig and get out of here.

Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot.

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