UKRAINE OUTREACH

Toensing Firm: We Had No Knowledge of Rudy Letter to Zelensky

Giuliani asked for a meeting with the Ukrainian president in the letter and said Toensing would participate.

Former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas gave congressional impeachment investigators a letter on Giuliani’s law firm stationery asking for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to new documents that the congressional committees released. The letter, from Giuliani and addressed to Zelensky, asks for a May meeting and says Victoria Toensing—a lawyer with deep connections in Washington’s conservative legal community—would participate in the meeting. Mark Corallo, a spokesperson for the law firm that Toensing helms with her husband, told The Daily Beast that no one at the firm had any knowledge of the letter. Corallo said the firm also had no knowledge of Giuliani’s outreach to Zelensky’s administration. Giuliani, meanwhile, has said last May that Toensing would be in Ukraine with him, as The New York Times reported. And Toensing has been open about efforts to find information in Ukraine related to a Biden-linked energy company. It is unclear whether Zelensky himself saw the letter; in a text the committee released, Parnas wrote that the letter was “shared via [Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen] Avakov.”

On Tuesday evening, Giuliani wrote to The Daily Beast that the letter simply “confirms that my role throughout was as a defense lawyer for the President seeking exculpatory evidence. Very helpful.”

-- Asawin Suebsaeng contributed reporting

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