Lev Parnas: Good With Smoke, Poor With Mirrors
- john raymond
- Jul 2
- 2 min read
Lev Parnas is an insider, but not a mastermind. He knows the smoke—the shady deals, the payoffs, the connections. But he doesn’t fully understand the mirrors: the geopolitical distortions, the strategic illusions, the layered asymmetries that define the modern war on democracy. He was inside Trumpworld, and that gives him credibility on the operational level. But that same proximity makes clear what he was not: a strategist.
This isn’t to diminish what Parnas has done since turning whistleblower. He has provided a vital look into how the Trump-Giuliani circle weaponized shadow diplomacy to help foreign interests. He has testified to the truth of what he saw. And he has made clear the extent of Trump’s corruption. But even as he tells these truths, he often reveals that he doesn’t grasp their full implications. His insights into people like Steven Witkoff—real estate oligarchs embedded in soft influence games—are valuable. But when the conversation shifts to the Kremlin, Parnas is no longer our guide.
To Parnas, Trump was corrupt, Giuliani was reckless, and their enablers were greedy. True. But he often describes events as though the sum of those qualities explains the whole picture. It doesn’t. What’s missing is the recognition that all of these actors were being used by a larger, colder intelligence: the Kremlin strategy of asymmetric warfare. This is what Parnas fails to decode. He understands the tactical rot. But not the strategic structure that turned that rot into a weapon.
Like Michael Cohen, Parnas was a fixer. But unlike Cohen, Parnas seems capable of growth. He shows signs of curiosity and reflection. He wants to tell the truth now, not just for self-preservation but out of some emerging principle. That makes him useful. But we should not mistake him for an oracle. He can show us the rooms he walked through. He cannot diagram the building.
Parnas is best used, then, not to explain Trump or Putin, but to explain the middlemen. The Witkoffs. The Firtashes. The pliable evangelicals. The transactional lawyers. The investors who acted without asking where the money came from. He can show us how these men got roped into serving autocracy while pretending they were just playing the game.
In that way, Parnas is good with smoke: he knows how corruption spreads. But he’s poor with mirrors. He hasn’t quite seen how that corruption reflects and refracts through history, into asymmetric campaigns, and ultimately back into the heart of American governance. The picture he offers is incomplete. But it’s still worth looking at—if you know where the blind spots are.
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