In the explosive whistleblower complaint released this week, in which an intelligence official sounds the alarm over Donald Trump’s effort to solicit the help of Ukraine in his bid for re-election, one name is repeated: Rudy Giuliani.

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The former New York mayor appears in flashing lights at the top of the document. In the second paragraph, the anonymous whistleblower says: “The president’s personal lawyer, Mr Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort.”

The author goes on to refer to Giuliani 31 times, painting a picture of a lawyer who in the service of his old friend and now personal client – Trump – set himself up as a virtual state within a state. Giuliani is accused of circumventing national security protocols as he scurried between Washington and Kyiv carrying private orders from the president, many of dubious legality.

That the man who was hailed as a national hero, “America’s mayor”, in the wake of 9/11 should now find himself accused of undermining national security amid a billowing impeachment scandal is extraordinary in itself. Even more astonishing is that so many of the details of the Ukraine connection have been put into the public domain by Giuliani himself.

He has been so willing to speak openly on cable TV and social media about his dealings with top Ukrainian officials seeking dirt on the leading Democratic presidential candidate, former vice-president Joe Biden, that he has deepened Trump’s legal peril almost on a daily basis.

Q&A What is the Trump-Ukraine scandal at the heart of impeachment? Show Hide In a July 2019 phone call, Trump asked Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to mount an investigation of his potential rival for the White House in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and son Hunter Biden – and also to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, instead of Russia, was behind foreign tampering in the 2016 election. Trump framed the requests as a “favor” after he reminded his counterpart that “the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine”. Overshadowing the conversation was the fact that Trump had recently suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia . News of the call emerged in a Washington Post report on 18 September that an internal whistleblower complaint, filed in August, involved “communications between Trump and a foreign leader”. Trump’s attempted dealings in Ukraine caused a scandal in US diplomatic ranks. The Democrats have obtained text messages between top US envoys in Ukraine establishing that diplomats told Zelenskiy that a White House visit to meet Trump was dependent on him making a public statement vowing to investigate Hunter Biden’s company. Trump does not dispute public accounts of what he said in the call, as established by the whistleblower’s complaint, released on 26 September, and a call summary released by the White House itself. But Trump and allies have argued that the conversation – “I’ve given you that, now I need this” – was not actually as transactional as it appears to be. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has pressured Ukraine to smear Biden, and the whistleblower said White House officials had caused records of Trump’s Ukraine call to be moved into a specially restricted computer system. The vice-president, Mike Pence, has acknowledged contacts with Ukrainian officials while claiming to have no knowledge of Trump’s Biden agenda.

On 3 October 2019, Trump even suggested that: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.” Unlike when he was a candidate, Trump’s invitations for foreign powers to attack his domestic political opponents now have all the power of the White House behind them. Critics say this is a plain abuse of that power and it undermines US national security because it places Trump’s personal agenda first. The Trump administration also stands accused of obstruction of Congress for resisting congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony relating to the crisis. A lot of people – from the whistleblower, to career government officials swept up in the affair, to legal scholars, to Democrats and even some Republicans – believe it’s plausible that the president has committed an impeachable offense. Tom McCarthy in New York

On Thursday, Giuliani posted a tweet that extended the crisis from the White House to the state department. In the tweet, he reproduced a July text message from Kurt Volker, then US special representative to Ukraine, introducing Giuliani to a key adviser of the Ukrainian president.

The chilling undertone of the tweet was unmistakable: if I’m going down, you’re going down with me.

Giuliani’s overseas consulting work in eastern Europe stretches back to the mid-2000s. But his prominence in Ukraine grew after Trump’s 2016 victory, when he parlayed his close relationship with the president into security contracts and speaking appearances.

By his own account, Giuliani’s fixation with Ukraine began last November when, he told Fox News, he was approached by a “very significant distinguished investigator”. He has not named the investigator, though the whistleblower’s complaint and other sources have illuminated close ties between the former mayor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who until last month was Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, and Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin.

As the complaint sets out, Giuliani met Lutsenko at least twice: in New York in January and in Warsaw the following month. The timing of those encounters could be important in the rapidly unfolding impeachment inquiry in Washington, as they came at a key moment for Lutsenko.

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The prosecutor was facing growing criticism in Kyiv over stalled investigations into corruption. In November 2018, when Giuliani says he began to focus on the country, Lutsenko offered to resign after a young anti-corruption activist, Kateryna Handziuk, died from a sulphuric acid attack.

Lutsenko stayed in office. But the Guardian has learned that he began seeking a lifeline to the US, in the hope it might save him as difficulties back home intensified.

That lifeline was Giuliani.

“[Lutsenko] strongly needed some political ally, he believed that Giuliani could convey specific messages to Trump, and he created this message to become more interesting to the American establishment,” said a law enforcement source familiar with the Giuliani-Lutsenko connection.

That Giuliani might have been fed information by Ukraine’s then top prosecutor that was adulterated to make it more appealing to Trump is a startling potential twist in the developing scandal.

According to the Guardian’s source, Lutsenko appeared in conversation with Giuliani to have invented a “don’t prosecute” list he claimed was given to him by the then US ambassador to Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch – news of which apparently made its way up to Trump.

Yovanovitch was abruptly removed in May after Giuliani pressed for changes in the embassy. Giuliani has since claimed without evidence that the “don’t prosecute” list was part of a liberal anti-Trump conspiracy that included Yovanovitch and was bankrolled by the philanthropist George Soros.

The US state department has dismissed the claim as an “outright fabrication”.

‘Very helpful to my client’

Ukraine’s main attraction for Giuliani was the hope it might provide valuable damaging intelligence on Biden, who launched his presidential bid in April. Both Giuliani and Trump have grown increasingly excited by a conspiracy theory that in 2016 Biden pressurized Ukraine to fire its then chief prosecutor, Shokin.

Under this theory, Biden wanted Shokin out because he was investigating the vice-president’s son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a major Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. Several attempts to fact check the story that Biden acted corruptly to protect his son have found it to be false.

Here too, there is a suggestion that Lutsenko may have intentionally misrepresented the Burisma investigation to Giuliani, raising doubts about Hunter Biden’s activities, as a ruse to catch the attention of Trump.

“Mr Biden and his son were never the subjects of this investigation,” the Guardian was told by the source with knowledge of Lutsenko’s ties to the New York lawyer.

Lutsenko later changed his tune, and told the Washington Post this week Hunter Biden had done nothing wrong.

“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” the former prosecutor said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky meet in New York. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

As the Ukraine affair has deepened, the extent of Guiliani’s efforts to put flesh on the bones of his anti-Biden conspiracy theory has become clear. In addition to his meetings with Lutsenko, he made contact with a further four former Ukrainian prosecutors, including a Skype call to Shokin.

Those efforts reached fever pitch in May when Giuliani laid plans to visit the president-elect, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Serhiy Leshchenko, a journalist and former member of parliament who advised Zelenskiy during his campaign, said he believed Giuliani was urgently trying to meet the president-elect before his 20 May inauguration, after which their interaction could be restricted by protocol.

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We know what Giuliani wanted to talk to Zelenskiy about because Giuliani, true to form, told us. In an interview with the New York Times on 9 May, he said he wanted to encourage the new government to investigate the Bidens, saying “that information will be very, very helpful to my client”.

The backlash to his announced plan to engage with Ukraine for Trump’s political benefit was so intense that he cancelled the May visit. He diverted instead to Spain, where he met Andriy Yermak – he now claims at the instigation of the state department.

What did Giuliani say to Yermak, a top adviser to the new Ukrainian government?

“Just investigate the darn things,” he said, referring to the Bidens and other matters beneficial to Trump’s re-election hopes.

It is a sign of Giuliani’s imperviousness to public condemnation – some would say to reason – that he continues to dig himself and his client deeper into a hole. It could have serious consequences for them both.

Leshchenko believes Giuliani is in peril too.

“He was involved in international politics and trying to blackmail the Ukrainian government,” he said. “It should be a cause for an investigation.”