Ukraine’s attorney general equivalent says that his country is not investigating Joe Biden or his son Hunter over their activities in the Eastern European nation, despite coaxing from Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for them to do so, Bloomberg reports.
“I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko told Bloomberg.
Conservative media began to push a narrative earlier this year of the Biden family’s supposedly nefarious activities in Ukraine, alleging that, as Vice President, Joe Biden used his influence to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the position of his son, Hunter, on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma.
Giuliani picked up on the allegations, and last week was briefly booked for a trip to Kiev to push the country’s law enforcers to investigate Biden. Giuliani cancelled the trip after the New York Times reported it.
Lutsenko did reportedly say that he was planning to offer Attorney General Bill Barr information about Burisma’s payments to Hunter Biden so the U.S. Justice Department could “check” whether he paid taxes on the foreign income.
It’s not clear whether the Justice Department is investigating allegations of tax evasion by Hunter Biden. Trump and Giuliani have reportedly urged Barr to open investigations into Biden’s activities in Ukraine.
“Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws — at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing,” Lutsenko reportedly told Bloomberg. “A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”
The report says that Giuliani and Lutsenko met twice this year — once in New York City in January, and another time on the sidelines of a February conference in Warsaw hosted by the anti-Tehran Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) group.
Lutsenko told Bloomberg that Giuliani asked him if then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was “not loyal to President Trump.”
Yovanovitch was dismissed on May 6.
Read the Bloomberg report here.
