Michael Cohen testified Donald Trump into thirty-four felony convictions — the only criminal record ever attached to an American president. This weekend, Trump megadonor John Catsimatidis handed Cohen a radio show on 77 WABC, after telling the New York Post he “checked with the White House and they had no objection.” On a special Narativ Live, Zev Shalev convened the two people who watched this deal assemble in real time — Lev Parnas and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — to name what the hire actually buys.
Parnas put the transaction in one breath. “Michael Cohen wants to get a pardon. Michael Cohen wants to get back into the good graces of Donald Trump. Michael Cohen wants to start making money, living the lifestyle, and wipe out the past,” he said. His sources told him months ago that Trump and Cohen were talking directly and that Cohen had been inside the White House — back when the media treated the reconciliation as unthinkable. Parnas keeps receipts. “He never deletes his text messages. I even have the last text message, last week, where he texted me: let’s be friends.”
The mechanics matter. Trump cannot pardon a New York state conviction — his only road out runs through appeal, and an appeal needs the star witness recanting. Cohen supplied exactly that in January, claiming Alvin Bragg and Letitia James “pressured and coerced” his testimony. Shalev read the WABC arrangement against that timeline: a weekend slot now — Andrew Cuomo’s chair, while the disgraced ex-governor summers — with Catsimatidis dangling a five-day week “down the line.” Meaning, Shalev said, “if you come through with Donald Trump and you help him erase his criminal record, we will then let you have the five days a week.” Parnas didn’t treat it as a theory: “It’s not even a read. That’s exactly what’s going on.”
Leonard traced the deal to its origin — a document. After Cohen told an interviewer he had never heard Jeffrey Epstein’s name, one of her Substack readers surfaced an email from Cohen’s own lawyers proposing a Rule 35 motion: Cohen, already in prison, offering to trade information for a sentence reduction. “The information he had was information about Epstein and Donald Trump,” Leonard said. The man claiming ignorance had brokered the Palm Beach mansion deal that ended the Trump-Epstein friendship and, by his own later account, dropped the Katie Johnson file on Trump’s desk — with Epstein’s name on it.
Then the show played Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony: asked how many times Trump directed him to threaten someone, Cohen answered, “probably 500 times over the ten years.” Shalev added his own entry to that ledger: “He threatened all of us. He threatened me with choking.” Parnas filled in the pedigree — a childhood around the El Caribe, the Brooklyn club run by Cohen’s uncle and frequented by five mafia families and Russian godfather Marat Balagula — and named the succession: Roy Cohn, then Michael Cohen, then Rudy Giuliani, and now Cohen again. Trump always replaces the fixer. The fixer always comes back.
Where does it go? Parnas called WABC a test run. The endgame is bigger: Cohen berating Democrats on national television — Fox, if Trump gets his wish — building toward what Parnas described as the grand-reunion interview, a pay-per-view reconciliation. The station is already rehearsing the format. Giuliani held a WABC show until election denial got him fired. Anthony Weiner holds weekends. Roger Stone appears on the roster. Cohen inherits Cuomo’s chair. A rogues gallery, assembled by the one New York billionaire who phones the White House before making a hire.
The panel closed on the cost of covering it. Leonard described a month of coordinated attacks — fabricated websites, invented recordings, an obsessive account working her name “day and night” — that drove her to file FBI and IC3 reports. Shalev, called a Nazi despite a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, named the pattern from experience: get over the target and the institutional pushback arrives, dressed as something else. Parnas reported the same disruption across Substack — accounts bleeding subscribers, billing failures, chaos — four months before an election. The people reading the Epstein files are under attack; the man who offered to sell what he knew about the files just got a microphone.
Parnas promised the story doesn’t rest. He’s finishing an investigation into mega-donor money flowing through super PACs into democratic-socialist campaigns — foreign money included — and tracking special prosecutor Joe diGenova’s Southern District of Florida operation, which he warns will produce indictments aimed at Obama, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. And he opened a public campaign for a seat on Cohen’s new show. Equal time. On the record. With the texts.
Cohen swore Trump directed the crimes. He now sells the story that prosecutors directed him. Shalev’s advice ran the other way from the hype: ratings rule New York radio, and a show nobody hears dies fast. Spend your attention on the people reading the files — not on the man who offered to sell them.
Thank you Amy Gabrielle, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, Soso's World, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app.
