To win Rudy Giuliani’s help, Ukraine oligarch’s allies pursued dirt on Joe Biden
- Industrialist Dmitry Firtash, who is fighting extradition to US to face conspiracy charges, added pro-Trump lawyers to his team in hope of getting case dropped
- Giuliani is embroiled in impeachment probe over Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival
Associates of a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the US were working to dig up dirt on former vice-president Joe Biden last summer in an effort to get Rudy Giuliani’s help in the oligarch’s legal case, according to three people familiar with the exchanges.
Dmitry Firtash, charged with conspiracy by the US and living in Vienna, shuffled lawyers in July to add Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, vocal supporters of US President Donald Trump who had worked with Giuliani.
Around that time, some of Firtash’s associates began to use his broad network of Ukraine contacts to get damaging information on Biden, the people said.
DiGenova and Toensing have billed Firtash about US$1 million for their work, one of the people said. That includes costs for Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate, as a translator and important contact, the person said. Parnas was arrested last week along with several associates and accused of conspiring to violate campaign-finance laws.
People working on Firtash’s behalf collected a witness statement from Viktor Shokin, a former Ukrainian prosecutor-general.
The statement, dated early September, helped Giuliani renew an assertion that he had been advancing for months – that Biden had tried in 2016 to sway Ukrainian politics to help his son. US and Ukrainian officials have disputed Shokin’s account.