Rudolph "Rudy" Giuliani is not just the personal legal representative of the US president. He also plays a key role in the Ukrainian affair, in the course of which his boss Donald Trump is currently heading for an impeachment procedure. Several witnesses have recently emphasized in public statements the influence of the lawyer in the scandal surrounding military aid for the country.
Giuliani, on the other hand, does not seem to stress these allegations - on the contrary. As the "New York Times" reported, he traveled this week first to Budapest and then from Hungary to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
There he met, according to the newspaper decisive figures of the affair. Background: Apparently, Giuliani is working on a documentary series to be broadcast on the conservative US channel One America News. In it he wants to refute the allegations against Trump and represent the impeachment process as a supposed political theater. Two episodes have already been published.
Dates with the two ex-Attorney General
According to the New York Times, Giuliani met former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko in Budapest. The former US Ambassador to Kiev, Marie Yovanovitch, had recently placed a significant burden on her in a public hearing. He had tried together with Giuliani to push her out of office, so Yovanovitch.
Sergei Supinsky / AFP
Yuriy Lutsenko: Meeting with Giuliani in Hungary
In Kiev, it came on Wednesday apparently to an appointment with Viktor Shokin, Luzenko predecessor in the Office of the Attorney General. He is in the focus of the affair, because the then US Vice President Joe Biden end of 2015 had pushed for his dismissal. Against Schokin there were solid allegations of corruption, his departure had been welcomed internationally.
Conservative circles in the US, however, cling to the unsubstantiated claim that Biden had fired Shokin to protect his own son Hunter Biden, who worked for a large gas company in Ukraine. There is no evidence or clues for this theory.
Mikhail Palinchak / Presidential Press Service / AFP
Victor Schokin: Against him there were solid allegations of corruption
Nevertheless, Trump, the accusation at the core of Impeachment investigations, had urged the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj to investigate the alleged implications of the Bidens. Once publicized, they would have weakened Biden as a potential competitor in the presidential election of 2020. Trump's middleman in the affair: Rudolph Giuliani.
Giuliani is in Kiev with the film crew
All these interconnections are now worked up in the impeachment investigations - while Giuliani meets with exactly the persons who are in the center. For the documentation, Giuliani is accompanied by a film crew.
Asked by the "New York Times" about the motives for his trip, Giuliani said, "As a good lawyer, I gather evidence to defend my clients against false accusations." Trump's attempt to urge President Selenskyj to investigate the Biden, however, is undisputed and documented by a record of the corresponding phone call.
However, many Republicans are not convinced by the overwhelming burden of proof of a misconduct of the President. The fact that he is constantly talking about a "perfect phone call" and an alleged democratic "witch hunt" reinforces this misjudgment.