The Maddow media empire is growing. Rachel Maddow is the producer of a new documentary film about a key side-character from the first Trump impeachment called From Russia With Lev.
Lev Parnas — for those to whom the initial Trump impeachment already feels a lifetime ago — is a Soviet-born former Rudy Giuliani associate who got mixed up in the naughty business of scouring Ukraine for supposed dirt Giuliani believed the nation held on Hunter Biden and the Biden family, as well as in trying to orchestrate the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
Parnas first hit the news as a would-be fugitive, who had tried to flee the country on an airplane to Germany. But he got caught and arrested — and then made the interesting decision to yap. The film is based in part on Maddow’s blockbuster exclusive interview with Parnas in January 2020, which drew a massive audience and earned an Emmy nod for Maddow. The film is augmented with selections from dozens of hours of new interviews with Parnas and his associates, as well as what the production team are billing as “secret footage.”
Parnas would ultimately testify under oath against Trump before Congress, describing the coordinated campaign to falsely tar the Bidens with allegations of corruption in Ukraine. His criminal wrongdoing did not go unpunished. Parnas was later convicted, and spent time in prison for laundering illegal donations to the Trump campaign. (Parnas also talked to Rolling Stone about dropping a dime on Trump: “They thought I would shut up and be quiet, but I just want to get the truth out.”)
The award winning director of the documentary is Billy Corben (known for the film Cocaine Cowboy). The Parnas saga mixes international intrigue with strangely agreeable slapstick, Corben says. Parnas had aptly and hilariously been linked to a company called “Fraud Guarantee,” for example. The director insists: “Lev Parnas’ story is like Tom Clancy, if Jack Ryan was played by Jackie Mason.” Corben refers to the film’s genre as Florida Men Behaving Badly with World-Changing Geopolitical Stakes.
The film, acquired by MSNBC films, will premiere Sept. 7 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of an event billed as MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024. It will gain a wider airing in theaters and on the network later that month.
For Maddow, the movie represents another foray into mass media, expanding on her long-running cable show, her podcast “Ultra,” and a companion book Prequel about a fascist plot to take over the country in the pre-World War II era.
Touting the Parnas movie, Maddow describes his story as “un-put-down-able.” She also argues that the world should be populated with “more documentaries from an insider’s perspective about the Trump presidency,” wishcasting a Mike Pence documentary, a John Kelly documentary, and even a Rex Tillerson documentary. “But it takes someone like Lev Parnas,” Maddow says, “to be brave enough to speak up first.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”