Giuliani to Visit Ukraine Amid Growing Scrutiny of Biden, Origins of FBI Probe into Trump

The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Kristina Wong

President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani is planning to travel to Ukraine in coming days along with lawyer Victoria Toesning, Joe diGenova confirmed to Breitbart News.

“My wife Victoria Toensing is going with Rudy to Ukraine to investigate and gather facts,” diGenova said in a brief phone conversation. He referred further questions to Giuliani.

The trip, reported first by New York Times, is to encourage the incoming president to continue inquiries that could shed insight into the origin of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign, as well as into 2020 candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating a company his son worked for.

Giuliani told the Times if he meets incoming president Volodymyr Zelensky, he will “tell him what I know about the people that are surrounding him, and how important it is to do a full, complete, and fair investigation.”

He did not say whether he had briefed Trump on the trip but that the president “basically knows what I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer.” Giuliani reportedly had been planning for several weeks to travel to Kiev to deliver a paid speech about Middle East policy.

Ukrainian prosecutors under outgoing president Petro Poroshenko have reportedly opened investigations into whether Ukrainian officials tried to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election by releasing documents related to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

However, President-elect Zelensky has said he would like to replace the top prosecutor who oversaw some of those investigations, Yuriy Lutsenko. Giuliani has reportedly met with Lutsenko multiple times.

Giuliani defended the trip to the Times. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government,” he said.

With the special counsel investigation now ended, the Justice Department has turned to looking into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016.

The Ukrainian Embassy recently confirmed to The Hill that a Democratic National Committee contractor had asked for dirt on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort during the 2016 election in order to help Hillary Clinton.

Ukrainian Ambassador Valeriy Chaly’s office said in a statement that DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from Ukraine on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress, and also tried to have Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko comment on Manafort during a visit there in 2016.

Several months ago, a Ukrainian court ruled that an anti-corruption body aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leschenko wrongly interfered in the U.S. election by releasing documents to Democrats and Fusion GPS, the firm that produced Democrat-funded opposition-research on Trump.

There has also been growing media scrutiny over Biden’s involvement in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor whose office was overseeing investigations into a Ukrainian oligarch who employed his son Hunter.

According to another The Hill report, “with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.”

According to the report, Biden did not mention at the time that Shokin was leading a “wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings,” which employed Hunter Biden as a board member.

Toesning has tweeted previously on the connection between origins of the investigation into the Trump campaign and Ukraine. She tweeted on March 21 that the “real collusion began in @Ukraine”:

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