Washington Post: Giuliani recently met with former Ukrainian diplomat

DEVAN COLE, CNN by DEVAN COLE, CNN

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani met last week with a former Ukrainian diplomat who has previously “made unproven claims that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Kiev government in 2016 to dig up incriminating information” about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Giuliani has recently been working to get Ukraine to investigate matters connected to the release of negative information about Manafort.

Both the DNC and a contractor for the committee in 2017 denied working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump.

Giuliani told the Post in an interview that he had met last week with former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko.

Telizhenko “was in Washington and he came up to New York, and we spent most of the afternoon together,” Giuliani told the paper. He declined to tell the Post what he and Telizhenko had discussed, saying, “When I have something to say, I’ll say it,” according to the paper.

The Post said Telizhenko confirmed the meeting, saying, “We spoke on US-Ukraine relations and politics in DC and Ukraine.”

Earlier this month, Giuliani canceled a trip to Ukraine, where he had planned to meet with President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss matters related to Manafort, who was sentenced in March to seven and a half years in federal prison for financial crimes. Giuliani said he would no longer be taking the trip because “the meeting would have accomplished little and may be in the hands of those who might misrepresent it.”

The former New York mayor had also planned to investigate Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden on the trip.

Giuliani was expected to press the country’s leadership for an investigation into Biden’s call to remove a key Ukrainian official in 2016, when Biden was vice president. Biden had called for the removal of the top Ukrainian prosecutor, who at one point had been investigating a Ukrainian company connected to Biden’s son Hunter.

Within a year of the prosecutor’s removal, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general dismissed the case against Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company controlled by one of Ukraine’s top oligarchs.

Other Western governments also called for his ouster, and no evidence has indicated that the move by Joe Biden was inappropriate.

CNN’s Michael Warren, Caroline Kelly and Kyle Feldscher contributed to this report.