The complicated web of Ukraine-focused relationships that has Giuliani at its center
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was duly employed by 2018 as a personal lawyer to President Trump. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

By
Philip Bump
November 28, 2019 at 9:22 a.m. EST
At some point about a year ago, two groups found each other. One was made up of then-current or former Ukrainian officials looking for job security or redemption. The other was a collection of American lawyers and their associates, looking for political and financial benefit. At the forefront of that latter group was former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who by 2018 was duly employed as a personal lawyer to President Trump.
In recent weeks, the remarkable scope of the interplay of these two groups has become more apparent, thanks to news reports about their interactions and a willingness of one Giuliani associate to begin hinting about what he knows. That associate,
Lev Parnas, has good reason to make clear how much he knows: Facing federal campaign-finance charges, he’s eager to give prosecutors justification for cutting a deal.
The upshot, though, is that we now have a much better sense of what Giuliani and his associates were alleged to be doing during a period in which the former mayor was also helping effect Trump's pressure campaign on the Ukrainian government. We've compiled recent reports to give a sense of how Giuliani and his allies were quietly working with those Ukrainian officials.
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Last December, Parnas
connected Giuliani with a man named
Viktor Shokin. Shokin served as Ukraine’s prosecutor general under then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko until he was relieved of his position in early 2016. His firing was in part a function of pressure put on Poroshenko by former vice president Joe Biden, who joined other U.S. and international officials in suggesting that Shokin wasn’t effectively combating corruption.
Parnas connected Giuliani to Shokin as part of Giuliani’s effort to call into question the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, his formal mandate as a lawyer for Trump. Shokin, however, pointed Giuliani in a different direction, alleging that Biden targeted him because the former vice president wanted to protect his son Hunter Biden, then serving on the board of a gas company in Ukraine that was under investigation. There’s no evidence that this is true besides Shokin’s constant assertions, nor was it entirely a new theory, having been broached to some extent in the book “Secret Empires,” by conservative author Peter Schweizer. It nonetheless quickly became a central focus of Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine.
According to Parnas, Shokin also
reportedly met with another powerful U.S. official in the same time period: Rep.
Devin Nunes (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes has generally declined to answer questions about the allegation, although he did deny meeting Shokin in an interview with Breitbart News. Nunes is one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill. Parnas also
claimed that he served as a liaison between Ukrainian officials and Nunes’s staff and joined Nunes’s staff at meetings focused on Ukraine held at Trump’s hotel in Washington. (A later trip by Nunes’s staff to Ukraine to continue its investigation was
reportedly scrapped once they realized that the Democratic leadership of the committee would have to be informed.)
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In January, Giuliani, Parnas and a man named
Igor Fruman conducted an interview with Shokin by phone (after Shokin was denied a visa to come to the United States.). During that interview, Shokin reiterated his claims about Biden. He also criticized then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom Parnas and Fruman had
reportedly disparaged directly to Trump at an event in April 2018.
Two days later, Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman interviewed
Yuri Lutsenko, the man who replaced Shokin as Ukraine’s prosecutor general. Lutsenko made slightly different accusations against Biden. In that interview and one the following day, Lutsenko expressed frustration about competing anti-corruption organizations supported by Yovanovitch.
During those conversations and a meeting in February in Warsaw, Lutsenko
asked Giuliani for assistance in recovering money he claimed had been stolen from Ukraine and routed through the United States. To recover the money, he sought a meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, something that Giuliani said he could make happen, according to Lutsenko.
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Giuliani and Lutsenko discussed agreements involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in retainers, either from Lutsenko or the Ministry of Justice, that would leverage either Giuliani’s firm or the services of two lawyers close to Giuliani,
Victoria Toensing and
Joe diGenova.
Parnas and Fruman, meanwhile,
traveled to Ukraine with the goal of pressing Poroshenko (then still president) into investigating Biden and the 2016 presidential election. They promised Poroshenko a state visit in return, validating the offer by indicating that they were acting at Giuliani’s direction — and therefore Trump’s behalf.
Parnas and Fruman also did work for Toensing and diGenova, assisting them with some clients. Among the clients the pair
represented was another figure who became important in this time period: writer
John Solomon.