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Giuliani, who faces a criminal investigation resulting from his 2019 effort to dig up negative information on Joe Biden in Ukraine, has ties to both oligarchs. (A New York appellate court suspended Giuliani's law license on Thursday over another matter, citing "demonstrably false and misleading" statements he made in court and elsewhere about the 2020 election.)

In 2019, Giuliani sought Firtash's help pushing bogus claims that Biden, as vice president, had pressured Ukraine to fire a top prosecutor to derail an investigation of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden served as a board member. (Biden had indeed pushed for the removal of the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, but that was because the official was not pursuing anti-corruption investigations vigorously enough.) For the past seven years, Firtash has been fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces charges for allegedly bribing Indian government officials to secure a contract with Boeing. In 2017, prosecutors in that case labeled Firtash an "upper-echelon" associate of "Russian organized crime," an allegation he denies.

In 2019 Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American Giuliani associate (who also now faces criminal charges), urged Firtash to hire two lawyers close to Giuliani, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, a married couple friendly with then-Attorney General Bill Barr. Firtash later told the New York Times that Toensing and diGenova said they would use their influence to press for the Justice Department to withdraw evidence used in the case against him. (Toensing and diGenova eventually raised Firtash's case in a personal meeting with Barr.) According to Parnas' lawyer, Joseph Bondy, the lawyers wanted Firtash's help in exchange. "Per Giuliani's instructions," Bondy told the Times, Parnas "informed Mr. Firtash that Toensing and diGenova were interested in collecting information on the Bidens."

This arrangement resulted in Giuliani citing unfounded claims about Biden that had been generated by Firtash's legal team. In one example, in September 2019, Giuliani appeared on television touting an affidavit from Shokin, the prosecutor whose ouster Biden urged, containing allegations about Biden. Shokin says in the affidavit that he was speaking "at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash."

Explicit photos and emails purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden were circulating in Ukraine last year at the same time that Rudy Giuliani was searching for dirt there on former Vice President Joe Biden, two people approached about the material during that period tell TIME.

The emails' alleged availability, which has not been previously reported, comes to light in the wake of Giuliani's recent claims that he obtained private photos and emails of Hunter Biden from a broken laptop abandoned in Delaware. Giuliani, who is President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, has passed this material to right-wing news outlets, which began publishing it last week.

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