In a rare move for the indicted Ukrainian gas middleman, oligarch Dmytro Firtash issued a statement on Friday denying any involvement in Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to smear President Joe Biden.
“Mr. Firtash has previously stated that he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it,” reads the statement, issued by Firtash attorneys Dan Webb and Lanny Davis. “Mr. Firtash never authorized anyone on his behalf to have any involvement in an investigation about the Bidens in the Ukraine.”
The statement comes after FBI agents executed a search warrant on Giuliani’s home and office, and also seized Victoria Toensing’s phone under a warrant.
Firtash was indicted in 2014 on federal foreign bribery charges. The indictment left the oligarch stranded in Vienna, where he has spent the the last seven years fighting extradition to stand trial in a Chicago federal courtroom.
In summer 2019, he hired Toensing and her husband Joe DiGenova in a bid to convince the Justice Department to call off the prosecution. The two former Reagan-era prosecutors also hired a Giuliani associate, Lev Parnas, reportedly for $200,000 to work as a translator. Prosecutors later said that they had found evidence that Parnas had received a $1 million loan from longtime, Geneva-based Firtash attorney Ralph Isenegger.
Toensing and DiGenova secured a meeting with then-Attorney General Bill Barr in August 2019, but it had no discernible effect on the case. At the same time as the engagement took place, however, a document from Firtash’s case in Vienna found its way into the hands of conservative journalist John Solomon and Giuliani, who took the document with him on TV appearances and used it to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Bidens.
It’s not clear how that document was leaked from the case. In the statement, Firtash said that it had been leaked without his authorization and suggested that he was the victim, saying that he was “‘sucked into’ this internal U.S. fight without his will and desire.”
“He did not provide any ‘dirt-digging efforts,'” the statement reads. “Doing so might have helped Mr. Giuliani, he said, but it would not have helped him with his legal problems.”
“Mr. Firtash reiterates that did not have any information, did not collect any information, and did not finance anyone who would collect that information,” the oligarch’s attorneys added.
Davis, who stopped working for Firtash once Toensing and DiGenova were hired, was rehired by Firtash this month, FARA registrations show.
