Rudy Giuliani has said his controversial planned visit to Ukraine will not go ahead, because of concerns about whom he would be meeting.

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“The meeting would have accomplished little and may be in the hands of those who might misrepresent it,” Giuliani said in a statement released on Saturday.

Earlier this week, the former New York mayor, who is now an attorney for Donald Trump, said he planned to push Ukraine to pursue investigations he hoped could benefit the president politically.

But on Friday night, Giuliani told Fox News he would not go to Kiev after all, because he would be “walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president ... in some cases enemies of the United States”.

Citing “a person familiar with the conversations”, the New York Times said the Ukrainian president-elect, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was urged by advisers not to meet Giuliani.

Giuliani told Fox he was “convinced from what I’ve heard from two very reliable people tonight that the president is surrounded by people who are enemies” of Trump.

Giuliani had earlier used Twitter to seek to explain his rationale for a trip in which he said he would push for two investigations.

One regards the origin of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, under which Trump was not found to have conspired with Moscow but which left to Congress the question of whether he obstructed justice.

In his Saturday statement, Giuliani said the purpose of the trip had been “to share information to assist their ongoing investigation of Ukrainian officials being used by Americans to gather information to assist [Hillary] Clinton in [the] last election and to alert them to the very real dangers that there are people involved in the investigation ... who are attempting to shut it down before it reaches a conclusion”.

The Ukrainian investigation, he claimed, had the potential to reveal people who originated or propagated “the false claim of collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign.

The other investigation in which Giuliani expressed interest concerns the involvement of Hunter Biden, son of the former vice-president and 2020 Democratic hopeful Joe Biden, in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

Trump and Giuliani have urged scrutiny of Hunter Biden and questioned whether Joe Biden helped oust a Ukrainian prosecutor whose office was investigating the oligarch.

Some Trump allies have suggested they can tarnish Joe Biden with questions about corruption, founded or not, much as they did to Clinton in 2016.

Trump’s re-election campaign distanced itself from Giuliani’s efforts, saying it had nothing to do with the lawyer’s inquiry.

Democrats denounced what they said was an overt attempt to recruit foreign help to influence a US election. Speaking on Friday to the New York Times, Giuliani said: “They say I was meddling in the election – ridiculous – but that’s their spin.”

Under the Logan Act of 1799, private individuals are barred from conducting diplomacy. The act is frequently brought up in political argument. Trump cited it this week, in saying former secretary of state John Kerry should be prosecuted for his actions in regard to the Iran nuclear deal. No one has ever been convicted under it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Biden with his son Hunter in 2009. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In the Times’ original report about the Kiev visit, Giuliani said: “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do.” Giuliani also told the Times he thought there would be “nothing illegal” about such a trip, although “somebody could say it’s improper”.

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“And this isn’t foreign policy – I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

On Twitter on Friday, Giuliani asked the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, a fierce critic, to “explain to me why Biden shouldn’t be investigated if his son got millions from a Russian loving crooked Ukrainian oligarch while he was VP and point man for Ukraine.

“Ukrainians are investigating and your fellow Dems are interfering,” he wrote. “Election is 17 months away. Let’s answer it now.”

Adam Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the planned trip was evidence “the Trump administration is going down the same tragic path they did in 2016 seeking help from a foreign government again to influence an American presidential election. It’s appalling”.

Trump allies, Schiff said, were indicating that they were “going to do everything short of what’s downright criminal. Ethics don’t matter. Patriotism doesn’t matter.”