Hunter Biden was in attendance at Saturday night’s screening and Q&A of “From Russia with Lev,” which was followed by a Q&A with executive producer Rachel Maddow, director Billy Corbin and subjects Lev and Svetlana Parnas. The MSNBC documentary, which aired Sept. 20, includes a surprise scene where Biden and Parnas come face-to-face after Parnas admitted to making false and damaging allegations against Biden on behalf of then-President Donald Trump. Although Biden did not speak publicly, he listened intently to the Q&A and spoke privately with participants afterward. The screening, held at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, was sponsored by the American Cinematheque.
The Ukrainian-American businessman singled out Biden because Trump viewed his father, Joe Biden, as the biggest threat to his reelection in 2020. Parnas worked with Rudy Giuliani and his actions led not only to his imprisonment on numerous charges — including campaign finance and wire fraud — but also to Trump’s first impeachment trial.
“I never looked at him as a human being. I looked at him as a sign,” Parnas admitted to the audience. “I never sat down to think about what he was going through. What the Biden family was going through.” Parnas deeply wanted to apologize and clear Hunter Biden’s name, saying, “It has always been my mission to right a wrong.”
Parnas says he told a mutual friend he wanted to apologize, and Biden not only agreed to meet with him but also to let the documentary crew film him. Asked if he could imagine such a meeting happening, director Corbin joked, “I’m still not sure.” He added, “If you had told me three and a half years ago that this documentary would end with Lev Parnas and Hunter Biden hugging, I wouldn’t have bet on it.”
Paul Archuleta/MSNBC
Corbyn went on to detail the secret meeting, which took place on July 7. “I barely marked it on the calendar,” he said. After setting the date, they were met with several surprises, including Hunter Biden’s criminal conviction on gun charges, the Biden-Trump debate, and Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race. “He was like, ‘Well, that’s clearly not going to happen,’” Corbyn recalled each time. Even on the day of the scheduled meeting, he woke up to a text from Biden asking Corbyn to call him, and the director was certain the interview was a flop. “He said, ‘No, I just want to confirm the time and place and everything,’” Corbyn recalled. “And we had a really interesting conversation about addiction, which I had with my immediate family.”
To this day, Corbyn remains amazed that this happened, saying, “Why Hunter Biden did this — I’ll leave that story for him to tell one day.”
But Corbin noted that “Lev makes things interesting and strange, for better or worse.” That’s evident in the film itself, which follows Parnas’s often bizarre and often funny life as a Russian immigrant who finds himself deeply entangled in a presidential scandal. Producer Alfred Spielman, who runs Raconteur with Corbin, has previously described Parnas as having “a Forrest Gumby presence in many of the racketeering and fraudulent schemes in the Trump world.”
The film also explores how Parnas found his ideology shifting and chose to speak out — starting with a stunning interview with Maddow in January 2020. Parnas revealed that at the time, he had two choices for who to interview — Maddow or CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He called his wife to tell her, and Parnas says, “She said, ‘There’s no choice — of course it’s Rachel.’”
Parnas acknowledged that this was ironic, since he had considered Maddow “public enemy number one” up until that point because of her relentless coverage. But he also acknowledged that “there are a lot of reporters, a lot of people who have covered the Trump era. But there is no one like Rachel Maddow.”
For her part, Maddow knew Parnas was taking a big risk. “One of the things that’s not appreciated about that interview with Lev is that it was a really bad idea from his perspective, in the sense that he was under indictment at the time,” she said. “If you’re under indictment, it’s not a good time to do an interview.” In the interview, she was struck not only by how honest and forthright Parnas was, but also by the sheer volume of secret recordings he was able to provide. So when the idea of a film about Parnas was pitched, she said, “I knew we needed someone with incredible storytelling skills, reading comprehension skills, to be able to take the terabytes of information that Lev had on his phone and turn it into a compelling, provable story.”
Corbin was the first to reach out to Parnas, shortly after that interview. The director had snuck into Parnas’s X/Twitter direct messages and it turned out that he was a fan of Corbin’s previous work, including “Cocaine Cowboys.” Maddow also felt that Corbin and Spellman were the perfect pairing given their history of “telling very serious stories in the funniest way possible.” She noted that “I really think the best way to tell this story is to not let the ridiculousness go, to not run away from how ridiculous the story is, and at the same time, it’s very serious and terrible, and it has really profound and serious implications for national security and for a lot of people’s lives.”
While the film has plenty of silly humor and high stakes, it also has a certain amount of forgiveness. “There has been impunity for so many bad actors and people who have been beaten, whether it’s Andrew McCabe at the FBI or Peter Strack or Stormy Daniels or Lev and Igor or Hunter Biden — people who have borne the cost of this era, they have borne it on behalf of our country. And part of defending our country is defending them,” Maddow said.
“It doesn’t mean they’re perfect people and it doesn’t mean they haven’t been involved in some shady stuff,” she added. “But repentance is real. And the truth is the truth. And when people are being isolated and chewed out for political reasons and for the sake of advancing this movement that’s trying to overthrow our system of government, one of the things we can do is not just hide and scroll on our phones and worry about civil war, but recognize that there are real Americans right now whose lives have been destroyed as an example to all of us and to scare all of us, and we can stand up for those people.”
