As Congress moves to draft articles on impeachment, President Donald Trump told former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly last week that he had not ordered former Mayor Rudy Giuliani to go to Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump added that Giuliani is a “warrior” and he did not know what the former mayor was doing in Ukraine.
Trump said Giuliani has many other clients and has a history of doing work in Ukraine.
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Giuliani is under the spotlight of federal investigators for his Ukraine connections.
Giuliani, himself, through his lawyer, in an email, corroborated the president’s statement. The former mayor said that he had never gone to Ukraine for any investigations on behalf of the president.
Trump’s efforts to compel the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens are central to the impeachment hearings. A number of witnesses in the House Impeachment investigation have given testimony that Giuliani was the mastermind of a covert foreign policy on Ukraine, where the pivotal issue was to get Ukraine to conduct investigations that Trump desired. As the transcript of the famous July 25 telephone call shows, Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to be in touch with Giuliani.
Following this July 25 phone call, Giuliani travelled to Madrid and met an adviser of Zelensky. He told Andriy Yermak, a Zelensky advisor, that Ukraine should open an investigation of the Ukrainian company Burisma, which had Hunter Biden on its board of directors. Giuliani further wanted Yermak to investigate the Ukrainian officials, who had allegedly collaborated with the Democrats to leak information on Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is currently serving time in jail.
