Washington (AFP) – Hailed as “America’s Mayor” for helping New York navigate the difficult days after 9/11, Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is now at a center of the Ukrainian scandal engulfing the White House.
The 75-year-old Giuliani was the point man in an effort to seek political dirt from Ukraine on Trump’s potential 2020 Democratic presidential opponent Joe Biden.
The Republican president’s eager embrace of Giuliani’s quest has led to the opening of an impeachment inquiry for abuse of power by the Democratic-led House of Representatives.
And it has put Giuliani squarely in the sights of the House committees now deciding whether Trump should become just the fourth president in US history to be subject to impeachment proceedings.
The committees have subpoenaed Giuliani for documents related to his Ukraine dealings and they issued subpoenas on Thursday for two of his legal clients who were involved in his attempt to target Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American, and Igor Fruman, a US citizen who was born in Belarus, were arrested on Wednesday as they tried to leave the country.
They face charges of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign money into US political campaigns including $325,000 to a fundraising committee for Trump’s 2020 reelection.
Parnas and Fruman were spotted by The Wall Street Journal having lunch with Giuliani at the Trump Hotel in Washington just hours before they tried to board an international flight at nearby Dulles Airport with one-way tickets.
Adam Schiff, who is spearheading the impeachment inquiry as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the two Florida-based businessman “reportedly worked with Giuliani to pressure Ukraine for dirt on Trump’s opponents.”
The pair were also allegedly involved in Giuliani’s efforts to bring about the early removal of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was seen as not assisting his bid to get Ukraine to launch a probe into the Bidens.
Yovanovitch on Friday defied a White House order not to cooperate with the House impeachment probe and delivered a scathing deposition in which she said she does “not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me.”
“But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine,” she said.
In a clear reference to Giuliani and Trump, she said corrupt interests in Ukraine had “fought back by selling baseless conspiracy theories to anyone who would listen.”
“Sadly, someone was listening, and our nation is the worse off for that,” she said.
– ‘Central figure’ –
The House impeachment inquiry focuses on Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky during which he asked the Ukrainian leader to cooperate with Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr in investigating the Bidens.
In the complaint which sparked the impeachment probe, the whistleblower described Giuliani as the “central figure” in the effort to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”
Giuliani and Trump have claimed that Biden, while serving as Obama’s vice president in 2016, pressured Ukraine to fire the country’s top prosecutor to protect his son’s $50,000 a month position on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Those allegations have largely been debunked and there has been no evidence of any illegal conduct in Ukraine by the Bidens.
Besides Ukraine, Giuliani also figures prominently in another brewing potential scandal for the White House.
Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that Trump had pressed then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson in 2017 to help persuade the Justice Department to drop charges against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a Giuliani client.
Tillerson refused on the grounds it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation, Bloomberg said.
Giuliani has been a long-time Trump supporter and one of his most trusted advisors.
He was a surrogate for Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and delivered a prime-time speech during the Republican convention.
His combative TV interviews are legendary, as he spits out sentences rapid-fire, contradicts himself regularly and jumps frenetically from subject to subject.
After being passed over for a position in the Trump cabinet, Giuliani served as the president’s cybersecurity advisor before becoming his personal lawyer in April 2018.
He notably helped lead Trump’s defense during the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into whether his 2016 presidential campaign had colluded with Russia to win the White House.
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