Work in Progress: Aaron Parnas
Work in Progress with Sophia Bush
iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At just 25 years old, Aaron Parnas has already been on a wild journey. He began college at the age of 14, entered law school at 18, and wrote his first book in just two weeks while preparing for the bar exam! Today, he is a lawyer, activist, and TikTok news influencer with millions of followers!
Aaron tells Sophia that he was never interested in becoming a journalist. However, when Russia invaded Ukraine, he felt frustrated with the media coverage, so he took matters into his own hands, and the rest is history. He also opens up about the arrest of his father, Lev Parnas, shares the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop investigation, reflects on his transition from being a Republican to becoming a Democrat, and the newest headlines he is keeping an eye on!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone. It's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Work in Progress. Today, I am sitting down with someone whose brain I am |
| 0:21.5 | absolutely obsessed with and whose TikTok I am also obsessed with. Today we are joined by none |
| 0:29.2 | other than Aaron Parnas. He is a lawyer. He is an activist. And he also happens to be the son |
| 0:37.2 | of Lev Parnas. Yes, the gentleman who was arrested |
| 0:41.3 | for his role in the whole Trump-Ukraine scandal. My goodness. Aaron grew up in a staunchly |
| 0:50.1 | Republican family, was a Trump voter in 2016, and then was inside the first administration |
| 0:56.5 | and saw things that really will come up to the reality of what most of America is up against |
| 1:03.7 | with an incoming oligarchy. He has since become an activist in support of the Democratic Party, sure, but I would really just say in support of Americans, particularly schoolchildren. |
| 1:17.4 | It was the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that led Aaron Parnas to TikTok. |
| 1:23.8 | He actually works as a securities litigation attorney at a law firm in Washington, D.C. |
| 1:28.3 | But it was his personal connection to Ukraine and family on the ground that really alerted him to the fact that American media wasn't covering the whole story. |
| 1:38.0 | So Aaron decided to get on the internet and help. |
| 1:41.4 | Not only is he an impressive leader and the kind of guy who's bringing Walter |
| 1:46.0 | Kronkite energy back to the world of social media news, but he's also a lawyer. He graduated |
| 1:52.5 | with honors from law school at the age of 21. Yeah, this is a guy who got bumped up to high |
| 1:58.4 | school at the age of 14. And in 2020, he published a memoir titled Trump First, |
| 2:04.4 | how the president and his associates turned their backs on me and my family. |
| 2:09.3 | Today we're going to talk about what that was like, |
| 2:11.3 | seeing from the inside of a scandal, |
| 2:14.1 | how these enormous systems of politics work and how it really led him to interrogate himself, |
| 2:22.6 | his beliefs, and why he believes that truth and trustworthy information should actually be the |
... |
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