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- Rudy Giuliani spoke to President Donald Trump about the possibility of receiving a preventive pardon before Trump leaves office in January, The New York Times reported.
- Giuliani, who is Trump’s personal defense attorney, discussed the president’s pardon as recently as last week, but it wasn’t the first conversation they had about it, according to The Times .
- The former New York mayor is currently the subject of a federal criminal investigation to determine whether he violated foreign lobbying laws through his dealings in Ukraine and his involvement in the brutal sacking of former Marie Yovanovitch. United States Ambassador to Ukraine.
- CNN reported that FBI agents had contacted witnesses in recent weeks to ask questions about Giuliani’s work in Ukraine as well as possible ties to Russian intelligence.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump’s longtime personal defense attorney Rudy Giuliani has spoken to the president about the possibility of receiving a preventive pardon before Trump leaves office, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The Times, citing two people who spoke about the discussion, reported that Giuliani had raised the possibility with Trump as recently as last week, and it was not the first time the topic had been raised.
Giuliani is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the Manhattan Office of the Attorney General over whether he violated foreign lobbying laws through his work in Ukraine. Specifically, federal prosecutors are said to be examining Giuliani’s trade relations in Ukraine as well as his involvement in the firing of Marie Yovanovich, former US ambassador to Ukraine.
Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, told The Times: “He is not affected by this investigation because he did nothing wrong and that has been our position since day one.”
According to testimony from Yovanovitch and other witnesses during Trump’s impeachment process, Giuliani embarked on a smear campaign against the former ambassador after she refused to let him use the US embassy in Ukraine in his effort to get political dirt on President-elect Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 election.
Yovanovitch characterized the smear campaign against her as being based on “false statements by people with clearly questionable motives”, and said she felt “shocked” and “threatened” by the attacks against her. She was abruptly recalled in April 2019 and fired the following month.
Giuliani’s dirt hunt was part of the Trump administration’s shadow foreign policy chain on Ukraine, a top-down effort in which the president himself tried to force the Ukrainian government to launch investigations politically motivated against the Bidens to help Trump’s reelection bid. While putting pressure on the Ukrainian government, Trump froze nearly $ 400 million in vital military aid and suspended a White House meeting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was desperate for.
CNN also reported this month that in recent weeks FBI agents in New York have reached out to witnesses to ask questions about the former New York mayor’s work in Ukraine as well as possible links. with Russian intelligence services.
U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Russian agents were using Giuliani to channel disinformation towards Trump. The warning came after intercepted communications showed Giuliani had interacted with several people with ties to Russian intelligence when he traveled to Ukraine in December to search for dirt on the Bidens.
Among those Giuliani met was a Ukrainian national named Andrii Derkach, who has since been sanctioned by the Treasury Department on charges of acting as a Russian agent and spreading disinformation about the Bidens and the elections. of 2020. Giuliani was hesitant to recognize Derkach as a Russian agent, telling the Daily Beast in an interview last month that “the odds of Derkach being a Russian spy are no better than 50/50.”
The Washington Post reported that Trump also brushed aside warnings about Giuliani’s vulnerability to being exploited by foreign intelligence services, shrugging his shoulders and saying, “It’s Rudy.”
Giuliani’s ties to Russian interests were brought back into the limelight last month, when he coordinated a widely discredited New York Post article purporting to show “hot” emails between Hunter Biden and a top Burisma Holdings executive on the ‘set up a meeting with Joe Biden when he was vice president in 2015.
Giuliani, Trump and their allies took to the story and said it proved Biden abused his government position to shut down a criminal investigation into Burisma in order to protect Hunter, who was on Burisma’s board of directors in the time.
As Business Insider previously reported, there is no evidence that these claims are true, and they have been debunked by intelligence assessments, news reports, congressional investigations, and testimony. And shortly after the article was published, NBC News reported that federal authorities were investigating whether the emails, which The Post said they obtained from a USB drive returned by Giuliani, were part of an foreign influence operation.
The former New York mayor is now spearheading the Trump campaign’s hesitant legal effort to overturn the 2020 election results. Campaign and Republican officials have filed more than two dozen lawsuits in the states of the United States. countries, but they did not win any cases.
Giuliani appeared on Monday at an event with the Arizona state legislatures in which he alleged a broad and baseless conspiracy theory of voter fraud and rigging which he said was proof that the election results were illegitimate.
On Monday, the six battlefield states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia – certified their election results, cementing Biden’s victory.
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