Parnas contended that Trump ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton to fire Yovanovitch but that they did not go through with it. A smear campaign was concocted, he theorized, to create more sympathy for a Yovanovitch purge.

“I mean, that was becoming comical because I couldn’t understand: You’re the president” and no one was firing her, Parnas said. “So that’s where I think the smear campaign started coming about. I think it was like a boost to them to help him if the media started, like, egging him on that there was really something there, he’d just tweet and fire her.”

Parnas said Yovanovitch’s ouster last spring was motivated by her resistance to Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainians into an investigation. Yovanovitch testified in the House impeachment inquiry that she was subject to a smear campaign to get her thrown out of her post.

Parnas also alleged that former Energy Secretary Rick Perry was a direct intermediary in pressuring the Ukrainian government to launch an investigation into the Bidens, at one point even getting the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenksy, to agree to launching an anti-corruption probe. Parnas said Trump’s team was unsatisfied, however, that it was not explicitly centered on Biden.

“Every time somebody would meet Zelensky, they would, like, agree and then they would walk it back,” Parnas said. “So they announced something about corruption, that he’s going to get corruption, but Giuliani blew his lid on that, saying that’s not what we discussed. That wasn’t supposed to be a corruption announcement. It has to be about Joe Biden.”