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.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.