In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that aired Wednesday, Lev Parnas provided new details about the Ukraine pressure campaign.

Parnas was a business associate of the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and is a key figure in Giuliani’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into caving to President Donald Trump’s demands for political dirt against his rivals.

Parnas implicated several senior administration officials in his interview, including Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, and Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.

Parnas’ interview with Maddow aired the day after the House Intelligence Committee released documents detailing his central role in the pressure campaign.

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Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American business associate of Rudy Giuliani – the former New York City mayor who is now President Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney – has sent shock waves through Washington by implicating senior administration officials in the scheme to bully Ukraine into caving to Trump’s personal demands.

Trump sought investigations from Ukraine into his political opponents while withholding vital security assistance and a White House meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately wanted. Concerns over his dealings with Ukraine led to his impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Parnas spoke with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in an explosive interview that aired Wednesday, just one day after the House Intelligence Committee released a trove of documents containing text messages and handwritten notes detailing Parnas’ intricate role in the pressure campaign.

Here are Parnas’ most explosive claims from his interview with Maddow:

He corroborated impeachment testimony given by David Holmes, a State Department staffer who testified that he overheard Trump discussing his demands that Ukraine dig up or manufacture dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, with the US’s ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland. Holmes testified that he could easily hear Trump speaking to Sondland on the phone while dining out with Sondland, and Parnas corroborated that claim, telling Maddow he could hear the president talking loudly when people spoke to him on the phone, even when he wasn’t on speakerphone.

Parnas said Giuliani told Ukrainian officials that Parnas was Trump’s representative and was working directly on his behalf.

Giuliani instructed Parnas to tell a senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “in a harsh way” that unless they announced the investigations Trump wanted against Biden, Ukraine would not receive US military aid and Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration. Parnas told Maddow Giuliani instructed him to say “there would be no one” at Zelensky’s inauguration if he did not concede to Trump’s demands. Pence canceled his trip to Ukraine after Zelensky refused to publicly commit to the investigations at the time.

“The only motivation” behind the abrupt ouster of Marie Yovanovitch, then the US’s ambassador to Ukraine, was that she was “in the way” of Giuliani’s efforts to strongarm Ukraine into caving in to Trump’s political demands. Parnas describing Robert F. Hyde, the GOP congressional candidate who indicated he was stalking Yovanovitch’s movements in Ukraine: “I don’t even know how to explain him. He’s a weird character. He’s a weird individual.” When Maddow pressed Parnas and said the texts with Hyde stretched seven days, Parnas replied, “I think he was either drunk or was trying to make himself bigger than he was … I didn’t take it seriously.”

Attorney General William Barr “was basically on the team” as far as the Ukraine pressure campaign went. Barr “had to have known everything” about the investigation into the Bidens, Parnas told Maddow. Though he said he had never spoken with the attorney general, he said he was privy to conversations between Barr and Giuliani. A representative for the Justice Department told Maddow in a statement that Parnas’ claim about Barr’s role was “100% false.”

Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch close to the Kremlin, offered Parnas unproven dirt that would “blow up” the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in exchange for the Justice Department dropping its fraud and bribery charges against Firtash.

Parnas publicly apologized to Yovanovitch for his role in the smear campaign against her and for engineering her dismissal.

Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, “was aware” of Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine and “had a lot of information” that could help the president. “I was in shock when I was watching the [impeachment] hearings, and when I saw Devin Nunes sitting up there … I texted my attorney and said, ‘I can’t this is happening because they were involved in getting all this stuff on Biden,'” Parnas told Maddow. “It’s hard to see them lie like that when you know that it’s like that,” he continued. “It’s scary that he was sitting there and making all these statements and all that when he knew very well what was going on.” Nunes told the Fox News host Sean Hannity in December that he didn’t recall ever hearing Parnas’ name before, despite call logs showing he had called Parnas and Giuliani three or four times during the release of the Mueller report. “He knew what was happening,” Parnas said. “He knows who I am.”



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