It’s been a long, strange road for Rudy Giuliani, the hard-nosed prosecutor who gained fame as “America’s Mayor” for his leadership in New York City after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
Once seen as a promising Republican presidential candidate himself, Giuliani is now trying to beat back accusations that he was a key player in an international scandal that has President Donald Trump facing an impeachment inquiry.
Over the course of the past two years, Giuliani, 75, has held multiple meetings with officials from Ukraine as part of an effort to persuade that country’s government to open an investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings.
At the same time, Giuliani was pushing for a separate investigation into alleged cooperation between Ukrainian officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election, suggesting that Joe Biden had also played a role in that unproven conspiracy.
Joe Biden, of course, has long been seen as Trump’s most likely Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election, and is the opponent that reportedly most concerns the president. Giuliani has taken these actions, he said, in his capacity as the president’s personal lawyer.
Whistleblower complaint
The story came to a head this week with the release of a whistleblower complaint, later confirmed by a rough transcript of the phone conversation released by the White House, that claimed Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate the Bidens in the context of a phone call about military aid.
But Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy only took place after
In fact, the whistleblower complaint also accused Giuliani of complicating U.S. diplomatic efforts in Ukraine and forcing career State Department employees to attempt to “contain the damage.”
Speaking to The Washington Post earlier this year, Giuliani estimated that he had met with at least five current and former Ukrainian prosecutors in pressing his case against the Bidens.
He was also not shy about sharing his ideas publicly.
In May, for example, he demanded on Twitter, “Explain to me why Biden shouldn’t be investigated if his son got millions from a Russian loving crooked Ukrainian oligarch while He was VP and point man for Ukraine.”
In June, he again tweeted about Biden, suggesting that there were allegations that the vice president had “bribed” former Ukrainian Prime Minister Petro Poroshenko, though he did not include any evidence of such allegations, and none has since surfaced.
Diplomatic freelancing
Specifically, Giuliani has been pushing the theory that Biden, as vice president, took improper actions in 2015 by pressing the government in Kyiv to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was considered corrupt by a wide array of the United States’ European allies.
Giuliani’s claim, propounded in tweets, on television and in interviews, is that Joe Biden’s real motive was to quash an ongoing investigation of Burisma in order to benefit his son, who had been named a member of the company’s board, with a reported salary of $50,000 per month.
To date, Giuliani has produced no evidence that either of the Bidens took improper action. In fact,