Zev opened Thursday’s special report with a warning and a promise. “Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water,” he said. “Trump Russia is back.” Lev Parnas corrected him inside ten seconds. “Never left, Zev.” Fivestack didn’t run — Dean Blundell was out. What replaced it was eighty minutes with the man who spent years inside the world Narativ has been reporting on from the outside, and it started with a letter. Shalev told viewers what he has now said publicly: Melania Trump’s personal lawyer demanded he retract Narativ’s reporting on Paolo Zampolli, apologize, and pay damages. No suit has been filed. Today Shalev’s attorney, the trial lawyer John B. Williams, answered Alejandro Brito on the record. Shalev read it on air. The demand, Williams wrote, is “defective under the Florida Retraction Statute,” which requires a claimant to specify the statements alleged to be false and defamatory, and to do it with particularity. “You do not identify what specifically is false,” the letter reads, “nor do you provide any hint as to what the true facts may be.” Shalev’s own summary was shorter. “They don’t actually allege that I’ve done anything that is defamatory at all,” he said. “There is no maligning here. This is just truth.” Then he mentioned Zampolli’s 40th birthday party, with a toast from former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin. Then he showed the emails. Zampolli wrote to a Russian diplomat at the UN in September 2012 thanking him for a meeting with Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and asking that Moscow — “capital,” in his phrasing — send materials for a tiger-conservation event, Vladimir Putin’s pet cause. He asked that both Churkin and Sergey Kislyak be informed. He wrote to Prince Bandar offering Trump SoHo units while, by Shalev’s reporting, brokering Caribbean votes at the UN General Assembly. He told Ambassador Churkin’s private Gmail that Churkin’s attack on Christiane Amanpour’s Crimea coverage was “fantastic.” And on March 5, 2014, he wrote to the billionaire Ron Burkle: “I know you have been taking good care of 67. We are all working hard for 2016 election.” That was written more than a year before Donald Trump announced he was running. “Unless Paolo knew,” Shalev said. Then the charts went up — two of them, built between Narativ and Parnas over the past several days. “We’ve been connecting dots the past couple of days,” Parnas said. The first put Vitaly Churkin at the centre and Narativ’s own reporting around him: Donald Trump, Paolo Zampolli, Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, Sergei Lavrov. “These are not sideline characters who elected Donald Trump,” Shalev said. “These are the people who did it.” The second started with a question Parnas had been chewing on about the Tate brothers — why Romania, of all countries. “Eastern Europe is my back,” he said. “I know all the major players over there.” His sources, he told viewers, place the Tates in Romania under the protection of Semion Mogilevich — the man the FBI has called the boss of bosses of the Russian mob, and, Parnas said, the partner of the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas has sat with both. “I remember going back to 2010 or 2011, sitting in Kyiv and having coffee with Mogilevich and Firtash together.” Run the two charts against each other and a name sits on both: Sergey Belyakov, the FSB Academy graduate Jeffrey Epstein introduced to Peter Thiel in 2015 without mentioning the FSB Academy. Belyakov, Parnas said, is close to Kirill Dmitriev — the Putin envoy now conducting American diplomacy alongside Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. “When I saw that,” Parnas said, “I basically realized that it never ended.” Shalev supplied the join. Svetlana Pozhidaeva got her US visa on a Belyakov recommendation, went to work for Jeffrey Epstein, and when she was finished there went to work for Paolo Zampolli at the Dominica mission to the United Nations. Epstein held Russian visas for sixteen straight years — one sponsored by Belyakov’s ministry, one by the FSB’s own veterans’ fund. And behind all of it, Shalev pointed at the oldest relationship on the board. Mogilevich and Robert Maxwell were business partners moving billions out of the collapsing Soviet Union. Epstein is widely regarded as Maxwell’s heir apparent, and met Ghislaine Maxwell while her father was still alive. “You have to ask the question,” Shalev said. “What is the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Semion Mogilevich?” He said the answer is coming. Parnas closed on what he thinks the demand letter was really about. The Epstein files, he said, are missing the one thing that should be everywhere in them. “Where’s all the Russian money in the Epstein files? Where are all the Russian involvement of the Epstein files? Because that’s the part that they’re not releasing.” This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes, Shalev looked down at a number. The legal defense fund he had launched a few hours earlier had passed $7,800. As we post this it was nearing $10,000. “I actually can’t tell you the sense of relief,” he said, “knowing that I don’t have to find $10,000 right now to pay just the retaining fees.” Parnas had the last word on the letter. “Melania Trump and Donald Trump made a big mistake by going after Zev Shalev.” Shalev gave the last word to Nancy Pelosi who famously told Donald Trump, “With you, all roads lead to Russia.” Donate to the Narativ Legal Defense Fund Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Robin Payes, More Than Poetry, Jason Gael, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
