Rudy Giuliani defends to go to Ukraine to lobby for investigations related to Biden



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Giuliani told CNN that he intended to travel to Ukraine soon to meet with President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky, with the aim of pushing the country to investigate issues related to drug disclosure. Negative news about Paul Manafort, then president of the 2016 Trump campaign. The former mayor of New York also said that he would continue to ask questions about Vice President Joe Biden's call in 2016 to dismiss the Ukrainian supreme prosecutor, who had previously investigated a Ukrainian natural gas company linked to Biden's son.

Many Western governments and donors have called for the ousting of this prosecutor for blaming him for failing to solve the problem of corruption in the country. There has never been any evidence that Biden acted badly.

"I do not want any favors, I just want an investigation to be opened," Giuliani said during a phone interview.

A week ago, Giuliani told CNN that he had finished looking into Ukrainian affairs regarding Biden. But in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, he first announced that he would be going to Kiev to take stock. Giuliani told the Times to defend his efforts.
RELATED: Giuliani presents a potential role of attack dog for 2020 with the history of Biden-Ukraine

Giuliani said that he was meeting in his capacity as the president's personal advocate and that he was helping to defend his client. He called on the US Department of Justice to investigate both his questions regarding an alleged conflict for Biden and what Giuliani claims to be the corrupt start of the FBI's investigation of Trump.

Giuliani had previously told CNN that a "well-known investigator" whom he had known for years had put him in contact with current and former Ukrainian officials, with whom he was interviewed in person and on Skype. (In 2017, the Democratic National Committee and a contractor denied working with Ukrainians.)

In looking for evidence, Giuliani also discovered a story that would be detrimental to Biden.

In 2016, while Vice President Biden was pressuring the Ukrainian government to overthrow his senior prosecutor as part of a massive US-led anti-corruption campaign, his son Hunter Biden was part of the board of directors of a Ukrainian company under investigation by the same prosecutor. .

A year after the sacking of the prosecutor, the new Ukrainian Attorney General has filed the case against Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company controlled by one of the largest oligarchs in Ukraine.

The story of Giuliani is littered with holes. According to a Bloomberg report, the Ukrainian government's case against Burisma had been "dormant" since 2014, two years before Biden was successful in pushing the Attorney General to revocation. Biden was also joined in his anti-corruption campaign against the prosecutor by many European leaders as well as the International Monetary Fund – none of whom had family ties with Burisma.
Giuliani told the story to Washington journalists. The story circulated in the right circles for a few weeks until May 1, when the Times reported that state department officials at the time were "concerned" that this link do not complicate Biden's diplomacy.

The Biden campaign declined to comment further and referred CNN to a statement provided by a Times spokesperson that Biden was acting in Ukraine "without regard to the consequences that would have" on Hunter's commercial interests.

Attempts to reach Hunter Biden were unsuccessful.

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