Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, has delivered perhaps the most damning blow yet to Republicans’ effort to impeach Joe Biden: a video of Giuliani being told the president is not guilty of corruption.
Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman, has become one of the most outspoken critics of the Biden impeachment inquiry. Parnas helped Giuliani get in touch with Ukrainian officials during the latter’s efforts to find incriminating evidence on Biden and his son Hunter. One of those officials was former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Parnas shared a video on social media Wednesday night that showed him and Giuliani speaking on the phone. Parnas, who dubbed the clip “THE VIDEO THE REPUBLICANS DONT WANT YOU TO SEE,” identifies the man on the phone as Shokin.
“Was there any specific act that any of these people performed?” Giuliani asks. “Did they get a kickback? Did they get a bribe?”
“No,” Shokin replies.
THE VIDEO THE REPUBLICANS DONT WANT YOU TO SEE: Never before seen video of Rudy Giuliani questioning Viktor Shokin.
Rudy – “Was there ever any specific act that any of these people performed”? “Did they get a kick back”? “Did they get a bribe”?
Shokin – No!#LevRemembers pic.twitter.com/tGRnlrZqhi
— Lev Parnas (@levparnas) March 28, 2024
Shokin was fired in 2016 for corruption. Three years later, Donald Trump and Giuliani started a conspiracy theory that the Biden family accepted a $10 million bribe to remove Shokin to stop a probe into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that Hunter was working with at the time. Republicans have also repeatedly claimed that Biden, while serving as vice president, said the U.S. would withhold aid money to Ukraine unless Kyiv fired Shokin. Both these claims have been repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence, the former Ukrainian president, and the owner of Burisma.
But that hasn’t stopped Republicans, including Giuliani, from continuing to accuse the Bidens of corruption. That allegation forms the entire basis of the impeachment inquiry.
Parnas has repeatedly said there is nothing to those allegations, a statement further bolstered by the video he shared Wednesday night. In fact, according to Parnas, the impeachment effort is really based on Russian disinformation.
Parnas’s accusation is backed up by the arrest of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov. Smirnov alleged that Biden and his son accepted bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch, sparking the impeachment investigation. When the Justice Department charged Smirnov with providing false information to the FBI, he reportedly admitted that his story had been fed to him by a Russian intelligence operative.