WASHINGTON — When Rudy Giuliani set out to dredge up damaging information on President Donald Trump’s rivals in Ukraine, he turned to a native of the former Soviet republic with whom he already had a lucrative business relationship.
Over the past year, the two men connected Giuliani with Ukrainians who were willing to participate in efforts to push a largely unsubstantiated narrative about the Bidens. They played a key role in a campaign by pro-Trump forces to press for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine on the grounds that she had not shown sufficient loyalty to the president as he pursued his agenda there.
The indictment does not name or identify Giuliani or Trump. But it helps show how Giuliani, who was retained by Trump as a personal lawyer to fend off one challenge to his presidency — the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller — helped steer his client into another: dealings with Ukraine that are now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry by House Democrats.
Parnas had told associates that she was not open to his proposals related to the lucrative gas business in Ukraine, where Parnas pitched a natural gas deal to the chief executive of Naftogaz, as The New York Times reported last month. Kolomoisky said in interviews in the Ukrainian news media that Parnas and Fruman traveled to see him in Israel in April, ostensibly to talk about their plans to sell gas to Ukraine. But, he said, the two men then pushed him to arrange a meeting between Giuliani and Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In an interview Thursday, Giuliani at first seemed to acknowledge having advised Fraud Guarantee in 2018, then backtracked. “I can’t acknowledge it’s Fraud Guarantee, I don’t think,” he said.
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