Chris Wallace reported this morning on Fox News that two other names you’ll know have been working with Rudy Giuliani on his mission to strong-arm Ukraine into intervening in the 2020 election and help exonerate Paul Manafort: the husband and wife team of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. The two are frequent Hannity guests and at various points have been reported to be either joining or working with the President’s legal team. In this sense, working with Giuliani — the President’s so-called “private lawyer” — makes a fair amount of sense.
But there’s a bit more to this.
As I noted yesterday, material that has been surfacing from The Hill’s “opinion” reporter John Solomon and then echoed by Giuliani seems to originate with one of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful oligarchs who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort and had to flee Ukraine after the overthrow of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. He is in Austria, fighting extradition to the United States to face bribery charges.
His name is Dimtry Firtash.
Viktor Shokin is the “fired prosecutor” at the center of all these stories. As part of Firtash’s effort to avoid extradition from Austria to the United States, he asked Shokin to swear out the affidavit in which Shokin accuses Biden of getting him fired to protect his son Hunter. (There is no evidence any of this happened. There was no investigation of Hunter Biden or the company on whose board he sat at the time Shokin was fired.)
So to review, former Manafort business partner Firtash asks Shokin to swear out an affidavit in which he accuses Biden. The affidavit quickly gets into the hands of Giuliani and Solomon. And who just recently went to work for Firtash’s legal team? None other than diGenova and Toensing, as reported just this week by the Kyiv Post and other publications.
So the duo who we now learned has been working on behalf of the President with Rudy Giuliani to extort the Ukrainian government just signed on to represent the oligarch behind the affidavit in which the disgraced prosecutor says Joe Biden got him fired. And yes, the oligarch who got booted from Ukraine in 2014 is a former business partner of Paul Manafort.
