https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/the-debunked-biden-allegations-are-incredibly-useful-to-dmitry-firtash
"Firtash has been fighting a U.S. extradition request for five years, calling it politically motivated, and has begun to boost allegations against the Bidens as part of that campaign, hitching himself to the Trump train. He’s spent years wrapped up in his legal battles while stuck in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where he was located at the time the indictment dropped. Bloomberg reported on Friday that Firtash had paid around $1 million for a dirt-digging project on the Bidens. American lawyers he hired with ties to Trumpworld reportedly hoped to transfer the information to Giuliani in exchange for the Justice Department dropping the case. Firtash’s activities would appear to add another element to Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine: an indicted oligarch bankrolled at least part of the efforts to manufacture dirt on the Bidens, as Trump himself urged Ukraine’s president to investigate the same allegations. Firtash — an oligarch who made his money as a middleman in the country’s gas trade with Russia — has long argued that the case was brought against him for political reasons, specifically saying that U.S. officials sought to wall him and his political influence off from Ukraine. Being extradited and tried in the U.S. could spell the end for his ability to maintain control over his business empire. Thanks to his admitted association with Russian mafia grandaddy Semyon Mogilevich and to his lucrative position in the country’s gas trade with Russia, U.S. officials have long seen Firtash as a Russian cutout."
