Bipartisan group of senators takes aim at Rudy Giuliani's role as Trump's bag man in Ukraine

Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor and current lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks to members of the media during a White House Sports and Fitness Day at the South Lawn of the White House May 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images

A bipartisan group of senators — Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, and Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins — asked a question to Trump's defense team that appeared to take aim at the president's decision to have his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, carry out his pressure campaign in Ukraine.

The senators noted that the Logan Act bars any United States citizen without the authority of the State Department from communicating with any foreign government to influence that government's conduct in relation to any controversy with the US.

They then asked the defense team if the president will "assure the public" that private citizens will not be directed to conduct US policy unless they've been "specifically designated" by the president and State Department to do so?

Here's the Trump team's response: Deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin acknowledged that the question was made in reference to Giuliani but went on to say he wanted to "make clear" that no private person was carrying out foreign policy in the Trump administration.

He pointed to testimony from Kurt Volker, the US's former special envoy to Ukraine, in which Volker said he believed Giuliani was merely a "source of information" for the president, and "someone who knew about Ukraine and someone who spoke to the president."

Philbin also pointed out that the Ukrainians approached Giuliani as a nexus to Trump because "he was someone who could provide information to the president."

He added that Volker testified he did not believe Giuliani was carrying out Trump's policy directives but rather "indicating his views" of what he thought "would be useful" for the Ukrainians to use to convince Trump of their "anti-corruption bona fides."

Regardless, Philbin said, Trump's policy is to "always abide by the laws."

Fact check: It is not true that Giuliani was merely a "source of information" for Trump vis-a-vis Ukraine. More than a dozen witnesses have testified that Giuliani spearheaded the Trump administration's "irregular" foreign policy channel in Ukraine and was instrumental in engineering the ouster of Marie Yovanovitch, the US's ambassador to Ukraine, after he and Trump carried out a smear campaign against her.

Here's what Bill Taylor, the US's former interim ambassador to Ukraine, testified (emphasis ours):

"As the acting ambassador, I had authority over the regular, formal diplomatic processes, including the bulk of the U.S. effort to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion and to help it defeat corruption. My colleague, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, and our colleagues at the National Security Council (NSC) were my main points of contact in Washington in this regular channel. This channel is formally responsible for formulating and overseeing the implementation of U.S. foreign policy with respect to Ukraine, a policy that has consistently enjoyed strong, bipartisan support, both in Congress and in all administrations since Ukraine's independence from Russia in 1991."

"At the same time, however, I encountered an irregular, informal channel of U.S. policy-making with respect to Ukraine, unaccountable to Congress, a channel that included then-Special Envoy Kurt Volker, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and, as I subsequently learned, Mr. Giuliani. I was clearly in the regular channel, but I was also in the irregular one to the extent that Ambassadors Volker and Sondland included me in certain conversations. Although this irregular channel was well-connected in Washington, it operated mostly outside of official State Department channels."

Trump's team could presumably point to these comments to show Giuliani was not, in fact, engaged in official US policy, but rather a side errand for Trump's personal interests. However, that claim is undercut by testimony from Gordon Sondland, the US's ambassador to the European Union (emphasis ours):

"The suggestion that we were engaged in some irregular or rogue diplomacy is absolutely false. I have now identified certain State Department emails and messages that provide contemporaneous support for my view. These emails show that the leadership of State, NSC, and the White House were all informed about the Ukraine efforts from May 23, 2019, until the security aid was released on September 11, 2019."

Fiona Hill, the National Security Council's former senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs, testified that it wasn't until she heard Sondland's testimony that she fully understood what was going on when she served in the White House:

Sondland "was being involved in domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy and those two things had just diverged…I did say to him…I do think this is all going to blow up. And here we are."