Rudy Giuliani said Monday night that the State Department asked him to take a meeting with a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the days after a July 25 phone call between Zelensky and President Trump.
Appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Giuliani painted a picture of a high level of State Department involvement in his actions in Ukraine, where Giuliani has been working to drum up corruption allegations against Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
“The State Department called me and said would I take a call from Mr. [Andriy] Yermak, who’s number two or three to the president-elect, now the president,” he said. “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.”
“I wasn’t operating on my own,” Giuliani added.
The meeting between Giuliani and Yermak is part of a broader timeline that Democrats allege suggests improper behavior from Trump — namely, that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son during the July 25 phone call, leveraging his position as president in order to damage a political rival.
A day after the phone call, the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker was sent to Kyiv to meet with Zelensky. A few days after that, on Aug. 3, Giuliani met with Yermak.
In a letter on Monday, three House committees threatened to subpoena the State Department if it did not comply with a previous request for information on the interactions with Ukrainian officials.
Giuliani first acknowledged his conversations with Yermak — on the phone and in person — to The New York Times last month, saying he “strongly urged” investigations.
“When you have a decision like that, you’re going to piss off somebody, so you might as well make the right decision, right?” he said.
Giuliani told the Times the talks were arranged “with assistance from the State Department,” in the paper’s words, and that he was not representing Trump.
Yermak, the Times reported, “said it was not clear to him whether Mr. Giuliani was representing Mr. Trump in their talks.”
