Lev Parnas had a contrarian take on the Bondi firing. “She’s not getting fired. She’s not being reprimanded. She’s being put out to pasture making hundreds of millions of dollars as the ex-attorney general,” he said, calling the move theatrical — a Trump news cycle play designed to distract from a failing Iran war, collapsing poll numbers, and the Epstein files bearing down on the White House. Parnas argued that the real action was not the firing itself but what it accomplished: buying time, prolonging the cover-up, and ensuring Todd Blanche, who was already managing the Epstein file, now has full control of the Justice Department. “Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do,” he said. Shalev pushed back — this is a massive story, the attorney general fired twelve days before a sworn deposition on the Epstein files — and Parnas conceded the point. “It’s a big story,” he said. “But tomorrow everybody’s going to wake up and say, what changed? Todd Blanche is in charge.” Worse, not better.
And Blanche is deeply compromised. Ellie Leonard laid out exactly how. Blanche conducted the two-day proffer interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in July, in which Maxwell gave a clean statement about Trump being “a nice guy and completely uninvolved.” Leonard noted that whenever Maxwell began to say something that might have yielded real information, Blanche steered her away. Immediately after the interviews, Maxwell was upgraded to a lower-security facility — “what we call Club Fed, where she’s got Pilates and a puppy,” Leonard said. Maxwell perjured herself throughout those proffers, Leonard added, and it was easily provable from every file that came out afterward. She claimed Epstein had no computers when the FBI found roughly a hundred hard drives. She claimed she never saw him with young girls or with Trump. Blanche let all of it stand.
Leonard warned that the Epstein files themselves may now be at risk. “Go download everything you can,” she told viewers, “because my guess is this is going to disappear.” With Blanche running the DOJ, she expects the department’s search pages and publicly available records to be quietly pulled or altered rather than expanded.
Shalev connected the firings into a pattern. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security. Pam Bondi at Justice. Potentially Tulsi Gabbard at Intelligence — Parnas reported he believes she could be gone imminently. All three are women, all three led agencies central to the president’s internal and external security apparatus, and all three faced situations in which telling the truth under oath could incriminate the president. “We’re not talking about stealing something from the corner store,” Shalev said. “We’re talking about the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl.” The DOJ and FBI cover-up of the Jane Doe 4 allegations remains at the center of the crisis.
Leonard has been investigating the Jane Doe 4 case out of South Carolina and described it as “a second chance to get it right” — a reference to the Katie Johnson case, which she said did not receive the investigative attention it deserved at the time. She credited the Post and Courier of Charleston for doing extraordinary local investigative work that has verified details many thought could never be confirmed, including connections to the Renaissance Weekend, a gathering on Hilton Head Island organized by Philip Lader that became Bill Clinton’s inner circle in the 1980s and 1990s. Epstein’s emails confirm his awareness of the event, and flight logs place him in the area repeatedly in later years. The organizers told Leonard they swear Epstein was never there but cannot produce records to prove it.
The conversation turned to Michael Wolff, whom Leonard described as having functioned as Epstein’s journalism fixer in New York — making stories disappear and discrediting reporters who covered Epstein. Wolff conducted roughly a hundred hours of interviews with Epstein, and Leonard said that when you have that volume of material from the head of a thirty-year global crime syndicate involving children and billions of dollars, it must be made public. “If we had a hundred hours of interviews with Al Capone, you bet those would have been made public,” she said. Leonard has been in contact with Joanna Coles, the senior editor at the Daily Beast who co-hosts a podcast with Wolff, and has shared email threads that carry potential legal implications. Parnas added that Wolff and Coles have been releasing snippets of the Epstein tapes strategically on their podcast to drive traffic — but withholding the most damaging material. “They’re not releasing the tape where Epstein says Melania and Trump slept on my plane,” Parnas said. Shalev called it what it is: if people are sitting on evidence while a crime is still in progress, that is obstruction of justice.
Breaking news landed during the show: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Army Chief of Staff General Randy George to step down and retire, an extraordinary move amid the Iran war. Shalev noted this followed reporting about Hegseth’s broker attempting trades before the Iran strikes and Trump’s private admission at the leaked Easter lunch that seizing Iranian oil is a non-starter — a direct contradiction of his public address to the nation hours later. The military, Shalev suggested, may have told the president no.
The administration is in trouble — cornered on Iran, hemorrhaging cabinet members, cratering in the polls. But as all three agreed, this is no time to take the heat off. The cover-up has a new gatekeeper, the Epstein files face a more compromised DOJ than ever, and the midterms are the only mechanism left for accountability.
Parnas closed with a call to action. In coordination with Defiance.org and MeidasTouch, he is organizing a daily national phone and email campaign targeting members of Congress — a modernized protest designed to flood congressional offices until elected officials respond. The first demand: kill the Save America Act, which Parnas called an unconstitutional attempt to suppress mail-in voting through a national registration list administered by the U.S. Postal Service. “This midterm election is our presidential election,” Parnas said. Shalev agreed. If Democrats take the House in November, the Speaker could become president — and this regime, on its current trajectory, may not survive the accountability that follows.
Narativ Live is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Narativ is produced at narativ.org.
Thank you Lyudmila and Daniel, Rick Kohut, Sharon Dymond, Jude T Conway, LC - Silence is Complicity, 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.
