For
the past few years, as Rudy Giuliani gallivanted around the
world
looking for any kind of conspiracy that could help then-President Donald Trump
remain in office, one question hung over Giuliani’s rambles: Who actually paid
for his travels?
Thanks
to a report in this week’s New York Times,
we have a better idea. Giuliani’s paymaster wasn’t his client, nor was it any
of the other Americans in the conspiratorial cabal working to help Trump steal
the 2020 election. Instead, Rudy’s benefactor was the pro-Putin oligarch who
stood at the center of Trump’s first impeachment—and who arguably stood to
gain most by Trump retaining the White House: Dmitro Firtash.
As
the Times reported, text messages and interviews revealed that the
company overseen by Firtash—a Ukrainian kleptocrat currently awaiting
extradition to the U.S. on bribery-related charges—footed the bill for much
of Giuliani’s travels. Not only did Firtash’s company pay for Giuliani’s stay
in at least one luxury hotel, but it paid tens of thousands of dollars for
Giuliani’s flights around the world, including one trip on a private jet that
cost a staggering $36,000.
At
a minimum, these revelations confirm what was long suspected: A post-Soviet
oligarch connected to multiple members of Giuliani’s team was also financing his
travels. And it looks like Giuliani was able to obtain Firtash’s scratch with
relative ease—a single text message would often do the trick. “Running into
money difficulties on trip to London,” Giuliani wrote to Firtash’s translator,
referring to an upcoming meeting with the oligarch’s associates. Voila, private
planes and luxury hotels were at Giuliani’s disposal in short order.
The
news that an oligarch wanted in the U.S. for various and sundry crimes was secretly
funding the American president’s lawyer would, in a perfect world, be a scandal
unto itself. But the revelations regarding Giuliani and Firtash—an
“upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime,” per
the DOJ,
and a Putin ally to boot—go much further than Gulfstreams and gilded hotels, and
point directly to just how open, and corruptible, the Trump White House was.
It
also points right back to Trump’s first impeachment. Giuliani, after all, wasn’t
simply traveling on Firtash’s dime to simply add some exotic names to his
baggage claims. He was hard on the hunt for supposed “dirt” on then-candidate
Joe Biden, which Firtash’s allies were only too happy to provide. Not only were
Firtash’s American lawyers—Victoria Toensing and
Joe diGenova,
a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists moonlighting as attorneys—central to
peddling fabricated scandals about Biden, laundering it through right-wing
media figures like John Solomon, but they even managed to push such messaging
to Attorney General Bill Barr directly. Trump, of course, happily amplified the
rhetoric—and then threatened Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, saying
that he’d withhold American military aid unless Kyiv endorsed the allegations
by launching an investigation.
The
conspiracies reached their intended target: the American president. And just
like that, Trump was trading American foreign policy—and American national
security—for personal, political gain. He pursued a conspiracy, and
threatened a prone American ally, in the name of a conspiracy theory.
Trump’s
first impeachment—which now seems quaint compared to the January 6 horror show
that necessitated his second one—ended up being the fruits of these ill-intended
labors. But amid the tangle of names and conversations, meetings and
conspiracies, one figure always hung in the background, just outside the frame:
Firtash. There was Firtash hiring Toensing and diGenova, who played a central
role in injecting the so-called “dirt” on Biden into the broader news cycle.
There was Firtash paying a staggering $1 million to Giuliani bagman Lev Parnas
for supposed translation work. (“I’m the best-paid interpreter in the world,” Parnas
would later say.) There was Firtash realizing that a second term for Trump was his
best chance of escaping his impending extradition to the U.S. And, as we now
know, there was Firtash giving tens of thousands of dollars in travel funds to
Giuliani, the man who had direct access to the sitting American president.
It’s
still easy to get lost in the tawdry morass of details surrounding Trump,
Giuliani, Ukraine, and that first impeachment. But there’s a simple story at
its core: A pro-Kremlin oligarch, facing the possibility of being extradited to
the U.S. to face a trial for his criminal misdeeds, bankrolled an effort to trump
up a scandal on Trump’s opponent—all in the hopes of keeping a thankful (and
corrupted) president in power, the better to get his charges lifted.
Both
Firtash and Giuliani deny that this was the intent of any of this financing. “Giuliani
had no idea that Firtash was paying for those trips,” Giuliani’s lawyer told
the Times, with Firtash’s representative blaming “an inadvertent error”
on the financing scheme. Those assertions are about as plausible as Putin’s
claims that he invaded Ukraine simply to protect ethnic Russians—or, for that
matter, Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Of
course, Firtash’s and Giuliani’s efforts eventually fell apart. The oligarch
continues to await extradition to the U.S.—one reason he’s recently tried to
run a new con, in which he’s transformed himself into a supposedly
pro-Ukrainian patriot. Giuliani’s at least a bit more fortunate, insofar as the
investigation into his unregistered foreign lobbying work appears to be winding
down without any charges (though he still faces a mountain of evidence
regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election). And given
the new revelations regarding Firtash’s financing of Giuliani’s travel, the
likelihood of the two of them linking up again in the future remains
negligible.
But
the playbook Firtash created will long outlive him, and will persist beyond
these revelations. As Firtash illustrated, if you’re an oligarch who ends up in
trouble for kleptocratic crimes, you should hire pro-administration figures and
claim to have knowledge of “dirt” on a political opponent, regardless of its
accuracy or provenance. You should then dangle that information in exchange for
lifting American investigations and American charges—and wait for the
Americans like Giuliani to come calling.
It
was a playbook that revealed just how susceptible the U.S. remains for foreign
kleptocratic forces. It was also a move that was completely unprecedented in
American history. Some have dubbed it “strategic corruption,” highlighting how
these oligarchs and dictatorships use corrupt networks to access and undermine
democracy. But there’s another, more colloquial name that fits even better.
It’s a name that points directly to the kleptocrat who perfected it, and who
bankrolled it, and who nearly got away with it. Just call it the Firtash Model.