Rudy Giuliani on Friday acknowledged meeting recently with a former Ukrainian diplomat who’s made allegations that could be used as political fodder by Giuliani’s client, Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported.
“We spoke on U.S.-Ukraine relations and politics in D.C. and Ukraine,” the former diplomat and current political consultant, Andrii Telizhenko, told the Post.
Giuliani confirmed the meeting — “He was in Washington and he came up to New York, and we spent most of the afternoon together” — but did not detail the content of his and Telizhenko’s discussions.
“I can’t tell you a thing about the meeting,” he told the Post. “When I have something to say, I’ll say it.”
Telizhenko at one time worked in the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office, as well as in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., the Post reported.
The DNC and Ukrainian Embassy staffers, the Post reported, have “strongly denied” a number of claims made by Telizhenko that mesh with Donald Trump’s own biases, like one assertion that a DNC contractor worked with the Ukrainian embassy to find dirt on Trump and Paul Manafort during the 2016 campaign.
Earlier this month, Giuliani cancelled a planned trip to Ukraine — one apparently intended to look into potential political dirt on Joe Biden, and to clear Manafort’s name — after the New York Times reported on it.
“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Giuliani told the Times, hinting at “information” that he said “will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
The Biden campaign called the effort a “blatantly political smear.”
The current Ukrainian prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, appeared unwilling to get involved publicly.
“I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” he told Bloomberg.
