In addition to Rudy Giuliani, the feds also executed a search warrant on Wednesday on Victoria Toensing.
A federal prosecutor in the Reagan administration, Toensing has made a name for herself as a conservative media personality along with her husband, Joe DiGenova.
But it’s the couple’s involvement in the Ukraine affair that got President Trump impeached in 2019 which may be related to the warrant.
There are conflicting reports on the target of the warrant. Per Politico, the feds seized a cell phone, while the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that the warrant was executed on Toensing’s D.C.-area home.
Toensing’s firm released a statement saying that she “was informed that she is not a target of the investigation.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is leading the probe, declined to comment.
Even less is clear about the substance and focus of the Toensing warrant than the Giuliani one, which reportedly focused in part on potential foreign lobbying violations.
But the role that Toensing played in the Ukraine scandal might provide a sense of where prosecutors are looking.
Trump hired Toensing and DiGenova in March 2018 as part of his legal team for the Mueller probe. It’s not clear when or whether that engagement ended; in 2020 Trump named DiGenova and Toensing to the legal team that Giuliani ran to try to overturn the 2020 election results.
Documents from the first impeachment inquiry into Trump – yes, the Ukraine one – revealed that Toensing played a fairly deep role in Giuliani’s campaign to pressure the Ukrainian government into manufacturing dirt on the Bidens.
Lev Parnas, the indicted former Giuliani associate, provided documents to the House Intelligence Committee which included a May 2019 letter from Giuliani to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding a meeting. In the letter, Giuliani says that Toensing will accompany him.
That meeting never took place, though other reporting suggests that Giuliani and Toensing pursued business opportunities in Ukraine alongside the effort to get dirt on the Bidens. The Wall Street Journal reported that the two entertained, but ultimately declined, an offer to represent the country’s former chief prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, who was offering dirt on the Bidens.
The one Ukraine-related deal that did pan out involved Dmytro Firtash, a middleman in the Eastern European gas trade who has been fighting off a U.S. extradition attempt from Vienna since 2014.
That representation reportedly involved Firtash hiring Toensing to convince the DOJ to abandon the extradition proceedings – an effort that did not succeed and which reportedly even scared off then-Attorney General Bill Barr from intervening in the case, though he did meet with the team in August 2019.
But at the same time as Toensing started repping Firtash, right-wing writer John Solomon – also reportedly named in the Giuliani warrant – began to write articles apparently based on information from Firtash’s legal team.
At the time, Toensing was also representing Solomon.
No one is ever the target of the investigation, until they are.
My advice to her: start drinking heavily now.
The plot sickens…
These guys are the gift that keeps on giving.