The former top prosecutor in Ukraine who originally claimed to have dirt on Joe Biden said in a Tuesday radio interview in Kyiv that discussions with Rudy Giuliani began far earlier than previously known.

Ex-prosecutor general of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko said that Giuliani first invited him to New York City to discuss “Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections” and the Bidens in October 2017.

That puts Giuliani’s earliest reported contact with Ukraine nearly a year earlier than previously thought, and means it came when special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation was in full swing. It also places the initial contact between Giuliani and Ukraine at around the time of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s indictment in October 2017.

“At the end of 2017, Trump’s lawyer Giuliani started, through one of my subordinates, who his people knew in passing, to pass over invitations to meet in the states,” Lutsenko said, adding that he tried – but was unable – to meet in October, November, and December of that year.

In the interview, Lutsenko offered the reporter an innocent telling of his own interest in meeting Giuliani, saying without basis that the allegations were the subject of popular discussion in the U.S. at the time.