'Conned': Road to Trump impeachment may have begun with Giuliani getting played by Ukrainian prosecutor
by Joel Gehrke
| September 30, 2019 10:01 PM
President Trump faces impeachment because personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was manipulated by a disreputable official who hoped to avoid being fired by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to regional analysts and anti-corruption activists.
“Consider the notion that Rudy Giuliani, who is no fool, was conned,†a U.S.-based central European policy specialist who is active in Ukrainian issues told the Washington Examiner.
A consensus has been forming for months, in both Ukraine and in the U.S. government, that Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, who earned the distrust of local anti-corruption activists during his three years in office, lured President Trump's personal lawyer into a rash pursuit of dirt on Democrats that could ultimately bring the American president down.
Lutsenko, 54, convinced Giuliani that he had evidence of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden. But his back-channel meetings are widely perceived as an attempt to forge the kind of political alliance with Trump that would make it difficult for Zelensky to oust him.
“He did what he did maybe to make himself look like a valuable asset to the new regime,†Oxana Shevel, an expert in the post-Communist region at Tufts University, told the Washington Examiner. “He's a serious politician. Ukrainian politics [involves] figuring out where, informally, the power lies and being on the right side at the right time.â€
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/conned-road-to-trump-impeachment-may-have-begun-with-giuliani-getting-played-by-ukrainian-prosecutor
