A criminal investigation of Mr. Giuliani raises the stakes of the Ukraine scandal for the president, whose dealings with the country are already the subject of an impeachment inquiry.
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It is also a stark turn for Mr. Giuliani, who now finds himself under scrutiny from the same United States attorney’s office he led in the 1980s, when he first rose to prominence as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and later ascended to two terms as mayor of New York.
Giuliani said prosecutors had no grounds to charge him w/ foreign lobbying disclosure violations because he said he was acting on behalf Trump, not the Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, when he collected info on Yovanovitch and relayed it to the American government and media
Russia’s sabotage also ushered in a new focus at the Justice Department on enforcing the laws regulating foreign influence that had essentially sat dormant for a half-century and under which Mr. Giuliani is now being investigated.
Through his two associates who also worked to oust the ambassador, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Mr. Giuliani connected early this year with Mr. Lutsenko, who served as Ukraine’s top prosecutor until August.
Parnas told people Yovanovitch was stymieing his efforts to pursue gas business in Ukraine. Parnas also told people one of his companies paid Giuliani hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unrelated American business venture.
