A Ukrainian oligarch who helped President Donald Trump‘s re-election campaign investigate Joe Biden‘s son Hunter Biden has re-hired Democratic political operative Lanny Davis for help with his legal troubles.
Dmytro Firtash hired Davis and his firm Davis Goldberg & Galper this month as he faces federal bribery charges in Chicago. A billionaire gas magnate linked to former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Firtash is accused of laundering natural gas revenues and using the money to fund Yanukovych’s political party.
Davis’ firm is tasked with “attempting to correct the public record regarding false and misleading assertions in the media about Mr. Firtash by the prosecutors and others that may already have tainted the jury pool,” according to the contract filed with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The firm is also tasked with “attempting to prove that the indictment is invalid and should be dropped.”
The firm received an advance payment of $225,000 on April 12 for the first three months of work starting March 15 and is to be paid $150,000 for every three-month period starting in mid-June. Davis is registered on the account alongside Davis Goldberg & Galper partner Eleanor McManus.
Davis previously represented Firtash between 2014 and 2015 and again starting in November 2016 but was replaced in 2019 by Republican lawyers Joseph DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, associates of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Firtash became a player in Trump’s first impeachment trial following revelations that he had offered dirt on Hunter Biden if charges against him were dropped.
Davis is part of the legal defense team led by Dan Webb, the co-executive chairman of Winston & Strawn and a former US Attorney and special counsel in the Iran-Contra affair.
“I am pleased to rejoin [Webb’s] legal defense team … to prove that Mr. Firtash is innocent of the charges filed against him by US prosecutors in Chicago,” Davis told Politico, which first reported news of the engagement on Monday. “I hope that the Chicago federal prosecutors and U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. will re-evaluate the case as I believe it will be determined that there are no facts to support any of the charges against Mr. Firtash.”
Despite his close ties to Democrats, Davis was part of the team that represented Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen as he faced fraud and campaign finance violations later in the year for arranging payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Long before representing Cohen and Firtash, Davis was counsel to President Bill Clinton during his own legal troubles. Davis notably served as a spokesman for the White House regarding campaign-finance investigations and Clinton’s own impeachment trial.
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