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(CNN) - Rudy Giuliani's fingerprints are everywhere.
Despite having been invisible for several days after leaving aside his television interviews about the train crash, he is emerging with President Donald Trump as the most dominant and intriguing figure in the political trial drama.
The man who was once celebrated as the mayor of the United States lurks in the events of the Capitol as the details of his expansive role in the Ukrainian scandal fill the testimony of the witnesses who were publicly disclosed.
"I was always going somewhere," said the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, adding that Giuliani's foreign policy mission in Ukraine became more "insidious" over time.
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(AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster, file)
Giuliani was omnipresent, spoke on the phone with Ukrainian officials, inserted himself into American diplomatic meetings, sowing confusion and exasperation about what he was doing, witnesses said.
Even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could not stop the president's man and turned his eyes when Sondland mentioned it and said: "Yes, it is something we have to deal with," according to the transcripts of Sondland's testimony.
Revelations about Giuliani's mission continue to accumulate as the investigation of the political judgment of the Democrats progresses. Next week a new critical stage of the investigation opens with public hearings where the name of an absent Giuliani will surely be on everyone's lips.
The pages of testimony from recently published witnesses appear to be consolidating the Democratic case that Trump abused his power by seeking political favors from Ukraine. The president, however, insists that he did nothing wrong and discards the latest revelations.
The Giuliani Channel
The evidence of Giuliani's intimate participation in the Ukrainian scheme focuses on why the president was apparently so interested in evading diplomats and accredited senior officials from the United States.
And while Giuliani announced his own high-power legal defense team, speculation is growing about his own legal exposure and how the scandal will stain his own legacy.
"Even someone like Rudy Giuliani, who at one time was a pretty good lawyer, realizes he needs an outside lawyer," said CNN legal analyst Preet Bharara, who, like Giuliani, was a former US attorney for the District South of New York, in the “Situation Room” program of CNN.
"I don't know if he is in real criminal danger, but at least when they start investigating him ... he wants to have a capable lawyer by his side," he said.
The torrent of revelations about Giuliani will mean that Trump's attitude and mood regarding his lawyer and his most vociferous cable television advocate should be closely watched.
If the `resident begins to create some distance between them, Giuliani would not be Trump's first lawyer to face taking responsibility for the alleged irregularities of his client, as Trump's outburst Michael Cohen knows.
More fundamentally, the large number of revelations about Giuliani raises the question of whether Congress will get to the bottom of what is happening in Ukraine without his testimony.
Giuliani has said in the past that he would like to testify. But it seems unlikely that he has much to gain by doing so. Any attempt to avoid testifying before Congress arguing the lawyer-client privilege or executive privilege might not convince anyone given their unofficial role and ramblings about Europe, far beyond the limits of a relationship with Trump.
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You could also exercise your right to avoid self-incrimination given the current criminal and counterintelligence investigation of your business in Ukraine.
Giuliani rejected the idea that he was getting rich abroad through his partnerships with the president in a conversation with CNN investigative journalist Drew Griffin.
“I am in private law practice. I practice law honorably and well. I never had a complaint. I never had a problem in 50 years of private law practice, ”he said.
Trump has defended Giuliani in recent weeks, but the president has a history of minimizing his relationship with former associates when they get into trouble. There is also the possibility that your lawyer will become a useful scapegoat.
However, last month, Trump was with his New York partner.
“He is a great gentleman. He was a great mayor, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest mayor in the history of New York, ”Trump said. "He is a man who fights [against] corruption ... I know he is an honorable man."
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'Talk to Rudy'
At some point, the former mayor of New York was seen as a rogue freelance, who wandered around Kiev in an attempt to absorb dollars for his private business, while selling conspiracy theories about the 2016 U.S. elections.
But it is increasingly clear that his role was much more influential than that and that it was imbued with presidential authority.
The testimony shows that Giuliani established a powerful alternative diplomatic channel that not only overlooked the official channels of the United States, but also actively inhibited work to improve ties between the United States and Ukraine.
White House officials argue that there has been no clear evidence that Trump directly demanded a quid pro quo with Ukraine, by conditioning military aid and presidential visits to his agreement to investigate the 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
But the evidence suggests that the president directly commissioned Giuliani to lead an unofficial operation: that his personal lawyer should seek political favors from Kiev.
"He kept saying: Talk to Rudy, talk to Rudy," Sondland testified.
Over the course of this year, American diplomats gradually realized that Giuliani was now the foothold of action in relations between the United States and Ukraine.
James Baker, former FBI general advisor, told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that any argument that Giuliani was not acting at the president's request would not be credible.
"Applying his common sense to this situation, he would think that, of course, the president was acting through Giuliani," Baker said.
"If Giuliani's use was to create some kind of plausible denial like in Iran-Contra, I don't think it works, because it just makes no sense."
Biden states that "it is not credible"
The former US envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, said he told Giuliani that his claims that Biden was acting corruptly in Kiev on behalf of his son Hunter "were simply not credible." There is no evidence to support Trump's claims that the former vice president or his son did something wrong in Ukraine.
"I have known him for a long time, he is an integral person," Volker told Giuliani and his associate now accused Lev Parnas at breakfast on July 19 at the Trump hotel in Washington.
Volker's testimony also states that Giuliani had a direct channel to Trump on Ukrainian affairs and was painting a dark image of the new president Vlodymyr Zelensky to the American leader.
"He knows all these things and they have some bad people around them," Volker said paraphrasing the president, when he testified about what he called the "Giuliani factor."
Volker also revealed that the Ukrainians knew how to open a direct channel to Trump, through Giuliani.
Finally, the president's lawyer became a "problem," said the special envoy.
"The negative narrative that Mr. Giuliani was promoting was the problem ... it hindered our ability to build the relationship the way we should be doing," said Volker.
But he was not the only frustrated.
The then national security adviser John Bolton saw Giuliani as a "hand grenade" that "was going to blow up everyone," according to a statement yet to be revealed from the White House's former expert in Russia, Fiona Hill, sources told CNN last month.
Giuliani seems to have been orchestrating the potential quid pro quo that could cause Trump to be accused.
He insisted that a draft declaration on corruption that Ukrainians were preparing to issue at any given time includes references to Burisma, the energy giant that employed Hunter Biden, and a 2016 conspiracy theory that Ukrainians and non-Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential elections.
"Rudy said: 'Well, if you don't say Burisma and if you don't say 2016, what does it mean?' Giuliani said: "You know it's not credible," Volker said in his testimony.
- Drew Griffin and Patricia DiCarlo of CNN contributed to this story
Donald Trump political trial
