Lev Parnas, ex-member of Trump’s ‘cult’, runs for Congress as Florida Democrat

Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman who served a 20-month sentence for campaign contributions to Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, that secretly came from a Russian oligarch, has announced a bid to unseat María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American Republican who is in her third term as representative for Florida’s 27th congressional district.

Parnas rose to national attention during Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019, when it emerged that he had been the first to ask Trump to remove the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and then worked with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to press Ukrainian officials to make false claims about corruption by Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

In his announcement, Parnas said he will run as a Democrat. His son, Aaron, is a prominent Democratic activist and social media influencer with 5 million followers on TikTok and nearly 3 million on Instagram, and has been called the gen Z Walter Cronkite by Rolling Stone.

“I’ve spent years speaking out, exposing corruption, and warning about the dangers facing our democracy. Now it’s time to take that fight directly where it belongs — to Congress,” the elder Parnas wrote in a post on X.

Parnas was convicted of campaign finance violations in 2021 as part of a scheme to trade Russian political contributions, including $325,000 to Trump’s approved Super Pac, America First Action, for support for a legal cannabis company. While people with felony convictions may not vote in Florida, they are permitted to run for office.

After he was arrested and charged with campaign finance violations in 2019, Parnas released video recorded during an April 2018 donor dinner with Trump in which he told the president that “the biggest problem” in Ukraine, “where you need to start is, we got to get rid of the ambassador”.

“The ambassador where, Ukraine?” Trump asked.

“Yeah,” Parnas replied, “she’s basically walking around telling everybody: ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.’”

In her testimony to the House impeachment inquiry in November 2019, Yovanovitch denied that she had made the comments Parnas attributed to her. “Also untrue are unsourced allegations that I told unidentified embassy employees or Ukrainian officials that President Trump’s orders should be ignored because ‘he was going to be impeached’ – or for any other reason,” the career foreign service official said under oath. “I did not and would not say such a thing.”

In late 2018, Parnas began working with Giuliani to find or manufacture evidence of wrongdoing in Ukraine by Joe Biden, during his time as Barack Obama’s vice-president, to undermine Trump’s rival. In 2019, Trump asked Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to do him the “favor” of opening investigations into Biden and other Democrats in exchange for unfreezing US military aid.

In 2024, at a screening of the documentary From Russia with Lev, which told the story of how he entered Trump’s orbit and worked with Giuliani to solicit false accusations against Biden from Ukrainian officials, Parnas described himself as having previously been part of a “cult” around Trump.

“I was one of the leaders of that cult. I trained people in how to brainwash people in that cult. I can tell you as somebody that’s been in that cult and now is out of it, it’s a cult,” he said, predicting that many more would emerge when Trump lost the election, which he did not.

Lev Parnas with Donald Trump in Florida in an undated image released in 2019 by the House judiciary committee from documents provided by Parnas during the impeachment investigation against Trump. Photograph: AP

Last week, he told the Miami Herald that he had believed he was serving his country when he was actually being indoctrinated. “I was pulled into one of the biggest political scandals of modern American history, but something important happened in that moment,” Parnas said. “I woke up.”

Parnas’s campaign acknowledges that the candidate’s career includes “both professional successes and highly public challenges”. On his campaign website, Parnas says: “I’ve seen the swamp from the inside. They know me in Washington, and I’m the last person they want with a seat in Congress and the power to call them before the people.”

Parnas is not the only Ukraine-born figure involved in the impeachment proceedings to be running for office in Florida. Alex Vindman, a former National Security Council staffer, who listened in on Trump’s call with Zelenskyy and testified in the impeachment hearings that it had been “improper”, is running to be the Democratic nominee in the state’s November race for a US Senate seat.

“I stepped up when my country needed a soldier, I reported corruption at the highest levels of government, and now I’m stepping up again to fight for Floridians,” Vindman said in a post on X earlier this year.