This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
Two months before he pleaded guilty this week to nine federal tax charges, Hunter Biden was in a conference room in Los Angeles meeting a man inextricably linked to all his legal troubles.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani and his fixer in Ukraine, struggled to contain his emotions as he apologized to the First Son for his role helping then-President Donald Trump seek out evidence of political nepotism, a quest that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, as well as a series of criminal probes into Hunter Biden over drugs, money, and a gun.
“We get a second chance, both of us,” Hunter Biden told a crying Parnas. “Both of us,” Parnas replied with a fist-bump.
The striking exchange comes at the tail end of a two-and-a-half-hour confessional-slash-documentary that debuted Saturday in Brooklyn. The film, From Russia With Lev, will have arthouse screenings this week and its broadcast debut on Friday on MSNBC. MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow executive produced the project, her first documentary for the network.
The Biden-Parnas meeting was not one the film’s team imagined when they began more than 30 hours of interviews with Parnas and his associates, producers say. In fact, The summit didn’t come together until July, with cameras rolling in a Los Angeles conference room.
Parnas was part of the political operation that eventually found itself on the ground in Ukraine looking for dirt on political rivals to help Trump, who at the time was facing special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election interference that paved the way for the House to impeach Trump. Parnas’ effort was looking to preemptively discredit both Mueller and Joe Biden, who was again mulling a White House run.
Hunter Biden, who is facing up to 17 years in prison for this week’s tax-case guilty plea and another 25 years for lying on a gun application in a June conviction, seemed sincere in his forgiveness. “It really takes a big person to not only admit that they are wrong and to do so in public and to do so on the stage you did,” Biden said.
Parnas and an associate later were arrested for their alleged role in a scheme to direct foreign cash to a member of Congress in exchange for his help pushing the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from the posting, a case that resulted in a guilty verdict and a 20-month prison sentence.
“Just so you know, I wasn’t very sympathetic,” Hunter Biden said to mutual laughter.
In the years since, Parnas has become an outspoken critic of Trump, calling him “unfit for office” and an aspirational dictator. He also has repeatedly publicly repented for getting wrapped up in the right-wing effort to pressure Ukrainian officials to launch criminal probes in the Bidens for Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. In conservative circles, Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma is a manifestation of what is often—and incorrectly—short-handed to The Biden Crime Family. Parnas has testified to Congress that there’s no there there.
“I’m ashamed of myself. I truly believed that we were helping America. But looking back at it now, we destroyed America,” Parnas told the camera during the new film. “We have such division. People are at each other’s throats. And the sad part: that is exactly what Vladimir Putin wanted, and we gave it to him on a silver platter.”
Hunter Biden similarly knows the image rehabilitation tour circuit. He too published a book accounting for his fall from grace. Whereas Parnas got swept up in conspiracy theories and political dirty tricks and disinformation, Biden wrote his memoirs about his battle with addiction, which led him to thank Parnas during their meeting for making amends as if working a 12-step program.
But Biden, who has been fairly defiant about his prosecutions, also saw the chance to ask Parnas about documents that would later come to haunt him in the form of a tax case.
Those bank documents helped federal prosecutors bring a criminal case in California about unpaid taxes on cash Biden used to fund drugs and hookers. Rather than put his family through another devastating trial—the gun case in Delaware was deeply embarrassing to the Bidens as family dirty laundry seemed to come up daily—Hunter Biden entered a guilty plea on Thursday. Sentencing for the tax charges is expected mid-December after a mid-November sentencing on the gun conviction.
During the meeting, which took place while Hunter Biden still planned to fight the tax charges, saw his payoff for appearing on camera with his one-time nemesis.
“How did they get my bank records? My bank records aren’t even on a computer,” Biden asked.
Parnas responded that the documents had been secretly subpoenaed by the FBI and circulated in conservative media. Giuliani also took them himself to the Department of Justice.
Biden, a graduate of Yale Law, then went further. “When did it cross over from being a hair-brained Rudy Giuliani operation in concert with Trump to the Department of Justice? When did Trump’s lackeys inside the Department of Justice begin to also conspire to take me on?”
The reply: Almost immediately.
Toward the end of their meeting, Biden seems to absolve Parnas. “Bottom of my heart, I promise you, you’re a hero to me,” Biden said.
The scene is tough to watch but a demonstration that no grudge has to last forever. It offers a fascinating coda to a film that Maddow herself has described as a “very gonzo story.” But to be sure, the grace these two men modeled for the cameras is very much the exception to politics today.
Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
