Personal lawyer of U.S. President Donald Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani, plans to travel to Ukraine in the coming days to convince the new authorities not to stop investigations, which he believes will benefit the American leader, The New York Times has reported.
“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview with The New York Times.
According to the New York Times, Giuliani plans to travel to Kyiv in the coming days and wants to meet with the nation’s president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump.
One is the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
“There’s nothing illegal about it. 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,” the lawyer stressed.
If the meeting with Zelenskiy does occur, Mr. Giuliani said he was going to tell him what he knows about “the people that are surrounding him, and how important it is to do a full, complete and fair investigation.”
He said Zelenskiy’s efforts in Ukraine have the full support of Mr. Trump.
He declined to say specifically whether he had briefed him on the planned meeting with Mr. Zelenskiy.
“He basically knows what I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer,” he said.
In March 2019, the team of Robert Mueller completed the report on the alleged intervention of the Russian Federation in the 2016 elections in the United States and handed it over to the U.S. Attorney General William Barr. In a letter to the Congress, he announced that the investigators had not revealed any signs of collusion between the Russian Federation and D. Trump’s campaign headquarters.
The special prosecutor also did not lay charges of obstructing justice against D. Trump, leaving the matter to the discretion of the Prosecutor General. Barr concluded that there were no sufficient grounds for accusing the president.
Later, the U.S. Department of Justice published an edited version of Mueller’s report.
However, Democratic congressmen were unhappy with the testimony of William Barr before the Congress about Mueller’s report. In addition, representatives of the Democratic Party would like to ask Mueller about whether Trump obstructed his investigation.
