Washington (CNN) Rudy Giuliani said removing the US ambassador to Ukraine was a key part of his effort to dig up dirt on Democrats on behalf of his client, President Donald Trump, according to a new interview with the President's personal lawyer in The New Yorker.

Marie Yovanovitch , the career diplomat who was removed from her post in Kiev earlier this year, was frustrating his attempts to learn information about Joe Biden from Ukrainian sources, Giuliani said.

"I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way," Giuliani told reporter Adam Entous. "She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody."

Giuliani's admission appears to be the first time someone has directly linked Yovanovitch's removal to the desired investigations into Democrats.

This past summer, Trump began to lean on Ukraine to initiate two criminal investigations that Giuliani had been both publicly and privately pressing: one into Biden's son's involvement with a Ukrainian gas company and another into alleged Democratic collusion with Ukrainians in the 2016 election. No evidence of any criminal wrongdoing in either case has been discovered.

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