Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has scrapped a visit to Ukraine after Democrats denounced his plan to push the foreign nation to investigate Trump’s rivals.
President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has scrapped plans to visit Ukraine after Democrats denounced his effort to push the Eastern European nation to open investigations that he hopes could benefit Trump politically.
Giuilani said he will no longer fly to Kiev in coming days because he was concerned about who he would be dealing with there. Democrats said his plan marked an overt attempt to recruit foreign help to influence a U. S. election.
Giuliani’s visit had seemed poised to create an unprecedented moment — a lawyer for the American president seeking foreign assistance in trying to damage political rivals. To Democrats, it was a blatant evocation of Russia’s meddling on behalf of Trump when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016
« The meeting would have accomplished little and may be in the hands of those who might misrepresent it, » Giuliani said Saturday in a statement.
Giuliani had said earlier that he would urge the Ukrainian government to investigate the origins of special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s recently concluded probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U. S. election, and the involvement of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
Joe Biden is the early Democratic front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election. The Biden campaign has denied that Biden or his son, Hunter, did anything improper.
Giuliani said he has concluded that Ukraine’s president-elect is being advised by people who were the « very vocal opponents of President Trump and peculiarly vocal supporters of Hillary Clinton. »
TV star and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy beat incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a recent presidential election. Giuliani said he believes that the incoming president is being advised, in particular, by Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliament member who helped uncover the off-the-books payments made to onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
