The White House's Ukraine memo destroys Giuliani's attempts to frame the State Department
The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been claiming the State Department was the main driver behind his suspicious dealings with Ukraine’s leaders over the past few months. But the newly released White House rough transcript on President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirms Giuliani’s narrative is completely false.
Over the past few days, Giuliani has repeatedly insisted that the State Department asked him to meet with Zelensky’s advisers, whom he asked — as he admits — to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden and investigate how Paul Manafort’s Ukraine-related crimes were exposed in 2016. On Monday, Giuliani actually said he was on a mission from the State Department when he met with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky, in Madrid in early August.
“The State Department called me and said, would I take a call from Mr. Yermak,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “I was put together with Mr. Yermak. I talked to him. He gave me enormously important facts. I conveyed them all to the State Department. Unlike the media lies, fake news, I wasn’t operating on my own. I was operating at the request of the State Department.”
Last week, Giuliani told the Hill’s John Solomon the State Department actually “urged” him to talk to Yermak and that he reported back to two senior U.S. diplomats. “All of this was done at the request of the State Department,” he said. On Tuesday night, Giuliani claimed the State Department asked him to meet with Yermak “to facilitate a meeting between the president and Mr. Zelensky, to help them do that.” (Trump met Zelensky and several other world leaders this week in New York.) Giuliani named Ambassador Kurt Volker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine, as the State Department official who reached out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/25/white-houses-ukraine-memo-destroys-guilianis-attempts-frame-state-department/
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