Two buddies of Rudy Giuliani’s tried to arrange a deal with Ukraine’s last President whereby he would get a state visit to the U.S. during an election campaign, so long as Kyiv agreed to announce investigations into the Bidens and the 2016 elections, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman reportedly met with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv in late February to negotiate the deal. Poroshenko was beaten in an April presidential runoff election by the country’s current leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
The meeting reportedly took place in the offices of then-General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. Fruman and Parnas had traveled to Warsaw earlier in the month with Giuliani, where they met with the country’s top prosecutor.
Lutsenko went on to be the main source for a series of articles by John Solomon that laid the foundation for a host of baseless claims that Giuliani and President Trump have demanded Kyiv to investigate.
State Department official George Kent told House investigators that he believed at least some of Lutsenko’s activities had been “authorized” by Poroshenko, according to a transcript released Thursday.
