Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s plan to make Joe Biden’s Ukrainian entanglements into the next Benghazi is not faring well. Giuliani has recently been playing up an investigation into the Burisma Group, where Hunter Biden previously served as a board member. His theory: that then-Vice President Joe Biden called to remove former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was leading an investigation into Burisma, to protect his son’s interests. There doesn’t seem to be much to that theory, however. In an interview on Thursday, Ukraine’s current prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko distanced himself from Giuliani, and emphasized that the Ukrainian government had no plans to investigate Biden’s son.

While there is an ongoing probe involving Burisma’s owner in conjunction with a long-running criminal investigation into another mogul, he told Bloomberg, that matter is unrelated to Biden, and neither Biden nor Burisma are directly under investigation. He added that he would forward information to U.S. Attorney General William Barr about payments to the Burisma board—where Hunter Biden was apparently paid up to $50,000 a month—to determine whether Biden had paid U.S. taxes on the income. “I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” Lutsenko told Bloomberg. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws—at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”

Even before now, Giuliani’s plan had met with some roadblocks. As Bloomberg noted, the timeline doesn’t add up; Biden senior’s call came a year after Biden Jr. had left the Burisma board. Still, Giuliani had been doggedly pursuing it, even planning a trip to Ukraine to encourage the government to continue the probe, which could theoretically have damaged one of Donald Trump’s political rivals. He ultimately decided to scrap the trip due to the Democratic “spin.” “They say I was meddling in the election—ridiculous—but that’s their spin,” Giuliani said about pushing for the Burisma Group investigation, which he previously claimed could yield “information [that] will be very, very helpful to my client.”

The Bloomberg comments appear to be a reversal for Lutsenko, who The New York Times previously reported had reopened the investigation into the Burisma Group, and who has reportedly already met with Giuliani multiple times. Before splitting with Giuliani with his most recent interview, the prosecutor was even seen as something of a Trump shill: His reported decision to reopen the investigation was seen by some as an attempt to curry favor with Trump, and Lutsenko has also previously investigated whether other Ukrainian officials attempted to sway the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton. He also helped to turn the Trump camp against the soon-departing Ukrainian ambassador Masha Yovanovitch, who Lutsenko alleged had given him a “do not prosecute” list that, as my colleague Abigail Tracy noted, was “presumably to shield Obama–Clinton allies.” (Lutsenko has since walked back those comments and claimed he instead asked Yovanovitch for a “do not prosecute” list.)

Lutsenko’s refusal to investigate Biden now may be the death knell for Giuliani’s Ukrainian plan, as any investigation seems unlikely under Ukraine’s next administration. Ukrainian president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky is slated to be sworn into office by the beginning of June and will reportedly replace Lutsenko, whom the Zelensky camp has faulted for his efforts to conspire with Giuliani. “Lutshenko has decided his only way to cling onto the prosecutor’s office is with the help of a Trump ally,” Member of Parliament Sergii Leshchenko told The Independent.

While Giuliani has been attempting to get the Zelensky administration behind his investigation scheming, and tried to meet with Zelensky during his now-cancelled trip, that also appears to be a fool’s errand. According to sources cited by The Independent and The Washington Post, Giuliani’s Ukrainian efforts haven’t gone down well with the incoming administration, which would really prefer to stay out of the U.S.’s partisan infighting entirely. “This is definitely not our war,” one person close to Zelensky told the Post. “We have to stay away from this as much as possible.”

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