Lev Parnas, a key figure from President Trump’s first impeachment who later turned against him, plans to run for Congress in Miami as a Democrat, the latest step in his reinvention as an anti-Trump politician.
Mr. Parnas announced his campaign in a video and post on Substack on Wednesday. He said he would run in Florida’s 27th Congressional District, held by Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Republican. The district, a swath of coastal Miami-Dade County, is heavily Hispanic and includes wealthy communities such as Key Biscayne, Coral Gables and the Brickell neighborhood of Miami.
“I’m running because I know the system — Donald Trump’s system — from the inside, because, remember, I helped build MAGA,” he said in the video.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Parnas elaborated, saying that his background had turned him into “an advocate for speaking truth to power.”
“I came to a point where I felt that talking was kind of cheap,” he said. “I needed to try to see what I could do, and I decided that the way I could help our country, and the best way that I could help our district, was throwing my hand up for the seat.”
Mr. Parnas, 54, is a Ukrainian-born naturalized American citizen who helped Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani try to find damaging information in Ukraine about Hunter Biden, son of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Parnas and another associate were arrested and accused of funneling Russian money into American political campaigns in 2019. Shortly after, Mr. Parnas began to turn against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Parnas’s work in Ukraine figured prominently in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment in 2019; the Senate acquitted the president the following year. In 2021, Mr. Parnas was convicted of federal campaign finance violations and sentenced to 20 months in prison. (As a felon, he will be unable to vote for himself, he confirmed in the interview.)
In 2024, he testified before Congress about his unsuccessful efforts on Mr. Giuliani’s behalf to link the Bidens to corruption in Ukraine.
Mr. Parnas, who was raised in Brooklyn, said he recently moved to the 27th Congressional District from Boca Raton, Fla., about 45 miles north of Miami, and added that he had lived in Florida for about three decades.
The district used to be among Florida’s most competitive, but that was before Republicans consolidated their power in recent election cycles. Still, several first-time Democratic candidates are running or considering a bid for the seat, eyeing the possibility of an anti-Trump wave in November.
Ms. Salazar, a Cuban American who is in her third congressional term, has disagreed with the Trump administration on immigration and other policies, a tacit acknowledgment that her district leans more moderate than others in the Miami area.
Mr. Parnas said he considered immigration a top issue in the race and suggested he would be a more competitive challenger to Ms. Salazar because “I’m not a true Democrat.”
“Remember, I was part of Trump world,” he said.
Mr. Trump has pushed states to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterms; a handful of new Republican-led districts across the country could help the party keep control of the House. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has endorsed redistricting in Florida but has delayed the drawing of any new maps until late April, causing uncertainty among incumbents and their potential challengers on what boundaries might look like.
Two incumbent House Republicans, Vern Buchanan, based in southwest Florida, and Neal Dunn, of Panama City, are retiring and will not seek re-election. A third, Representative Byron Donalds, of Naples, is instead running for governor. He is currently the front-runner in the Republican primary.
All three represent what have been safe Republican seats. None has drawn more interest from Republican challengers than Mr. Donalds’s district, including former Representative Chris Collins of New York, who resigned from office in 2019 as he prepared to plead guilty to insider trading charges. Mr. Trump pardoned him in 2020.
Also running is former Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who lost his re-election bid in 2022 after a series of scandals.
Both Mr. Collins and Mr. Cawthorn now live in Florida.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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