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Rudy Giuliani Isn’t the Only Shady Lawyer in the Trump-Ukraine Scandal
Meet Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, tied to almost every foreigner in the impeachment saga, including an indicted oligarch
For the past few months, Rudy Giuliani has chewed up screen time and headlines at a rate he hasn’t seen in nearly two decades. With every development surrounding President Trump’s unprecedented efforts to strong-arm Ukraine, there’s Giuliani, keening on cable news, pushing outlandish claims about Joe Biden’s supposed corruption in Ukraine, pumping out conspiracies and butt-dials alike. Indeed, no American this side of Trump has played such a central role in the unfurling impeachment saga as Giuliani.
But Giuliani’s not the lone American spearheading the smears against Biden. He’s had help from Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, a husband-and-wife lawyer team directly connected to every other major player in Trump’s impending impeachment, including a man the United States previously described as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.” And like Giuliani, they have avoided registering any of their recent foreign work with the Justice Department. Understanding their role—and their spiraling relationships with all the other major players on both sides of the Atlantic involved in the ongoing impeachment revelations—may well be the key to getting a handle on how we ended up here in the first place.
Toensing and diGenova first gained notoriety during the Clinton administration, when the former federal prosecutors became sought-after commentators during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. At the time, the pair were regular fixtures on cable news, speaking out against Bill Clinton, and were even at the center of a retracted story about the Secret Service supposedly witnessing “compromising” actions between Clinton and Lewinsky. The couple’s legal work picked up, ranging from representing a former congressman who reportedly demanded campaign contributions from foreign lobbyists to helping lead probes into illegal fundraising on behalf of Democrats.
Just trying to keep track of their multiple roles is enough to induce a migraine.
