At some point about a year ago, two groups found each other. One was made up of then-current or former Ukrainian officials looking for job security or redemption. The other was a collection of American lawyers and their associates, looking for political and financial benefit. At the forefront of that latter group was former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who by 2018 was duly employed as a personal lawyer to President Trump.In recent weeks, the remarkable scope of the interplay of these two groups has become more apparent, thanks to news reports about their interactions and a willingness of one Giuliani associate to begin hinting about what he knows. That associate, Lev Parnas, has good reason to make clear how much he knows: Facing federal campaign-finance charges, he’s eager to give prosecutors justification for cutting a deal.
The upshot, though, is that we now have a much better sense of what Giuliani and his associates were alleged to be doing during a period in which the former mayor was also helping effect Trump’s pressure campaign on the Ukrainian government. We’ve compiled recent reports to give a sense of how Giuliani and his allies were quietly working with those Ukrainian officials.
View the complete November 28 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.