Episode
SPECIAL REPORT: TRUMP-RUSSIA IS BACK! 96 DAYS BEFORE THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
- Published
- Jul 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4924
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.narativ.org/p/special-report-trump-russia-is-back
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/fivestack-with-dean-blundell-zev-shalev-7267639/episodes/special-report-trump-russia-is-back-96-days-before-the-midterm-elections/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/fivestack-with-dean-blundell-zev-shalev-7267639/special-report-trump-russia-is-back-96-days-before-the-midterm-elections.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Zev opened Thursday’s special report with a warning and a promise. “Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water,” he said. “Trump Russia is back.” Lev Parnas corrected him inside ten seconds. “Never left, Zev.” Fivestack didn’t run — Dean Blundell was out. What replaced it was eighty minutes with the man who spent years inside the world Narativ has been reporting on from the outside, and it started with a letter. Shalev told viewers what he has now said publicly: Melania Trump’s personal lawyer demanded he retract Narativ’s reporting on Paolo Zampolli, apologize, and pay damages. No suit has been filed. Today Shalev’s attorney, the trial lawyer John B. Williams, answered Alejandro Brito on the record. Shalev read it on air. The demand, Williams wrote, is “defective under the Florida Retraction Statute,” which requires a claimant to specify the statements alleged to be false and defamatory, and to do it with particularity. “You do not identify what specifically is false,” the letter reads, “nor do you provide any hint as to what the true facts may be.” Shalev’s own summary was shorter. “They don’t actually allege that I’ve done anything that is defamatory at all,” he said. “There is no maligning here. This is just truth.” Then he mentioned Zampolli’s 40th birthday party, with a toast from former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin. Then he showed the emails. Zampolli wrote to a Russian diplomat at the UN in September 2012 thanking him for a meeting with Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and asking that Moscow — “capital,” in his phrasing — send materials for a tiger-conservation event, Vladimir Putin’s pet cause. He asked that both Churkin and Sergey Kislyak be informed. He wrote to Prince Bandar offering Trump SoHo units while, by Shalev’s reporting,…