Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, was up bright and early on Thursday morning to try to spin the remarkable interview that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did on Wednesday night with Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s bagmen in the effort to extort the government of Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Parnas claimed that Donald Trump “knew exactly what was going on,” and he also implicated Vice-President Mike Pence. “This is a man who is under indictment and who’s actually out on bail,” Grisham said on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump’s favorite morning show. “This is a man who owns a company called Fraud Inc. . . . We’re not too concerned about it. We know that everything in the Senate is going to be fair.”

The first part of what Grisham said was correct. After being arrested in October as he prepared to board a flight to Vienna, Parnas, a forty-seven-year-old Soviet émigré who grew up in Brooklyn, was charged with four counts of violating campaign-finance laws by trying to hide the source of political donations that originated in Russia. Campaign-finance records show that he listed his employer as Fraud Guarantee, a Florida company that, according to its Web site, helps people “reduce the risk of fraud as well as mitigate the damage caused by fraudulent acts.”

This was just one of many business ventures with which Parnas, who has lived in Florida for many years, has been associated. Others involved stockbroking, bullion dealing, and film production. After Parnas was arrested, the Miami Herald described him as a “former stock broker who has left a long trail of debts in Florida and beyond.” The wife of one of his debtors, who is pursuing a legal judgement of five hundred thousand dollars against him, told the Herald, “He financially ruined us.”

Parnas comes across as something out of a Carl Hiaasen novel. But Grisham failed to point out that he isn’t just a random grifter the Feds lifted from the street. He is (or was) a close associate of Giuliani, Trump’s political ally and personal lawyer. He has visited the White House, where he had his picture taken not only with Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence but also with the President’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. Parnas also attended Trump’s election-night victory party in 2016. Like Zelig, Parnas seems to pop up everywhere.

How did he obtain this sort of access? According to his account, he was a key player in Giuliani’s efforts last year to persuade the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open an investigation into the Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden. He travelled to Kyiv and spoke with top Ukrainian officials. He communicated with two lawyers who have close connections to the Republican Party—Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova—and kept in constant contact with Giuliani. “I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the President,” he told Maddow. “I have no intent—I have no reason to speak to any of these [Ukrainian] officials. I mean, they have no reason to speak to me. Why would President Zelensky’s inner circle or Minister Avakov or all these people . . . meet with me? Who am I? They were told to meet with me, and that’s the secret that they’re”—members of the Trump Administration—“trying to keep. I was on the ground doing their work.”

To be sure, Parnas has a vested interest here. Although he doesn’t have a formal coöperation agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the case against him, his lawyer is pushing for one. Parnas is clearly out to save his own skin. But he has documentary evidence to back up some of his claims. Among the materials he handed over to the House Intelligence Committee are hand-written notes from a telephone conversation he had with Giuliani, which include the statement “get Zalensky to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.” Text messages from last spring show that Parnas conversed with Giuliani and with Ukraine’s former attorney general, Yuriy Lutsenko, about efforts to instigate the removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. Additionally, messages from May, 2019, suggested that another associate of Parnas, an American businessman named Robert Hyde, was making efforts to place Yovanovitch under surveillance inside the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and to possibly have her removed.

During his interview with Maddow, Parnas dismissed his messages with Hyde, a former landscaper who is running for Congress in Connecticut, describing him as “a weird individual” who was “drunk all the time” at the bar of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where the two men first met. This statement from Parnas didn’t prevent the Ukrainian Interior Ministry from announcing on Thursday that it would investigate “a possible violation of the law of Ukraine and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which protects the rights of a diplomat on the territory of the foreign country.”

In any case, Parnas’s key allegations concern Trump and Giuliani, not Hyde, and they, too, are supported by documentary evidence. Perhaps the key document that he provided to Congress was a screenshot of a letter that Giuliani sent to President Zelensky on May 10, 2019, which said, “In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you on this upcoming Monday, May 13th or Tuesday, May 14th.” At the time, Giuliani was pretty open about the fact that he was trying to dig up dirt on the Bidens, and adverse publicity about these efforts eventually prompted him to cancel a trip to Kyiv. But this is the first documentary evidence that confirms what has always appeared obvious: Giuliani wasn’t just freelancing. He was working with the explicit knowledge and consent of Trump.

One of the cover stories offered by the White House and its Republican allies in Congress is that Trump was concerned about broader corruption in Ukraine, a claim that receives no backing in the transcript of his notorious July 25th conversation with Zelensky or anywhere else. Parnas dismissed this suggestion out of hand. “It was all about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden,” he said. “And, also, Rudy had a personal thing with the Manafort stuff, the black ledger, and that was another thing they were looking into. But it was never about corruption.”

Parnas also claimed that Vice-President Pence was directly involved in pressuring Ukraine. Last May, he said, Giuliani instructed him to tell a senior aide to Zelensky, who had only recently been elected, that Pence wouldn’t attend the inauguration if Ukraine’s new President didn’t agree to announce an investigation into Burisma and the Bidens. Within days, the White House announced that Pence wasn’t going to Kyiv. “Obviously, when Pence cancels, they get word,” Parnas recalled, referring to the Ukrainians. “So now they realize that what I was telling them was true.”

Like Grisham, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, dismissed Parnas’s claims, saying that Parnas “will say anything to anybody who will listen in hopes of staying out of prison.” Giuliani told the Times that Parnas was “a proven liar,” and he told MSNBC that he “never” told Ukrainian officials that Parnas was speaking on behalf of Trump.

Giuliani didn’t explain how he came to be involved with Parnas or what he had engaged the Soviet émigré to do. He also didn’t comment on the documents Parnas handed over to Congress. In a better world, the Senate would immediately subpoena both of them to appear at Trump’s impeachment trial and let lawyers for the defense and the prosecution question them. Almost certainly, this isn’t going to happen. Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party will make sure of it.