President Donald Trump defended his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Saturday after reports that federal prosecutors are investigating whether the former New York City mayor broke lobbying laws in his efforts to oust the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
"So now they are after the legendary 'crime buster' and greatest Mayor in the history of NYC, Rudy Giuliani," Trump tweeted. "He may seem a little rough around the edges sometimes, but he is also a great guy and wonderful lawyer."
His vocal defense of his attorney comes just a day after he seemed to put distance between himself and the former mayor when asked if Giuliani still worked for him. "I don't know. I haven't spoken to Rudy. ... He has been my attorney," the president said.
After those remarks, Giuliani told The Washington Post that he was still Trump's lawyer.
Trump's comment, posted on Twitter as he traveled in a motorcade to his golf course in northern Virginia, followed news that Giuliani's financial dealings are being scrutinized by federal investigators after the indictment of two of his associates on counts of violating campaign-finance laws.
The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Giuliani's efforts to have Yavonovitch recalled in a broader effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden's son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
The two Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested Wednesday. According to an indictment that federal prosecutors unsealed Thursday, the men were working for Ukrainian officials to remove Yovanovitch from her job.
A criminal investigation of Giuliani raises the stakes of the Ukraine scandal for the president, whose dealings with the country are the subject of an impeachment inquiry. It is also a stark turn for Giuliani, who finds himself under scrutiny from the same U.S. attorney's office he led in the 1980s.
Giuliani told the Times that federal prosecutors had no grounds to charge him in connection with violating foreign-lobbying-disclosure laws because he said he was acting on behalf of Trump, not the Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, when he collected the information on Yovanovitch and the others and relayed it to the U.S. government and the news media.
"Look, you can try to contort anything into anything, but if they have any degree of objectivity or fairness, it would be kind of ridiculous to say I was doing it on Lutsenko's behalf when I was representing the president of the United States," Giuliani said. Lutsenko had chafed at Yovanovitch's anti-corruption efforts and wanted her recalled from Kyiv.
It was unclear how far the investigation has progressed, and there was no indication that prosecutors in Manhattan have decided to file additional charges in the case. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman, declined to comment.
Giuliani attorney Jon Sale didn't immediately respond to calls and email messages seeking comment on the reported inquiry.
Giuliani also told the Times that he was unaware of any investigation into him, and he defended the pressure campaign on the Ukrainians, which he led, as legal and above board.
CNN and other news organizations earlier reported that federal prosecutors were scrutinizing Giuliani's financial dealings with his associates, but it had not been previously reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan are specifically investigating whether he violated foreign lobbying laws in his work in Ukraine.
Yovanovitch told impeachment investigators Friday that Trump had pressed for her removal for months even though the State Department believed she had "done nothing wrong."
ASSISTING GIULIANI
Parnas and Fruman have worked closely with Giuliani since he became Trump's personal lawyer last year.
John Dowd, a former lawyer for Trump who is representing Parnas and Fruman, wrote earlier this month to Democrats saying that they wouldn't testify in the impeachment inquiries, explaining "Parnas and Fruman assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman have also been represented by Mr. Giuliani in connection with their personal and business affairs."
Trump told reporters Thursday that he didn't know Parnas or Fruman.
"Maybe they were clients of Rudy," he added. As for photos of himself with Parnas at the White House posted on Facebook, he said it was possible "but I have pictures with everybody."
Parnas and Fruman had lunch Wednesday with Giuliani at the Trump hotel in Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported.
That would have been hours before prosecutors said the two were arrested trying to board a flight out of the country on one-way tickets.
The timing of the arrest suggests prosecutors knew the two men were leaving the country, which means they were likely tracking the pair before they were apprehended, according to John Moscow, former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office.
"How did the feds know, in real time, they were buying plane tickets?" Moscow said. "They were probably under surveillance."
And if they were under surveillance, then it's possible that investigators noted their recent meetings with Giuliani, he said. To that end, prosecutors might end up questioning Giuliani about whether he was aware they were planning to leave the country, among other topics.
Information for this article was contributed by John Hudson of The Washington Post; by Michael S. Schmidt, Ben Protess, Kenneth P. Vogel and William K. Rashbaum of The New York Times; and by Greg Farrell, Chris Strohm and Andrew Harris of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 10/13/2019