U.S. President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani said Friday on "Fox News @ Night" that he will not be traveling to Ukraine as previously announced.
Read alsoNYT: Giuliani plans Ukraine trip to push for inquiries that could help Trump
"I'm convinced from what I've heard from two very reliable people tonight that the president [Ukrainian President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky] is surrounded by people who are enemies of the president [Trump], and people who are – at least [in] one case – clearly corrupt and involved in this scheme," he said, according to Fox News.
Giuliani said that his decisions had nothing to do with the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The official also pointed to evidence that 2020 hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden improperly pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and the country's parliament to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, in March 2016.
As UNIAN reported earlier, Giuliani planned to travel to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to meet with the nation's president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Trump, and could help him in his re-election campaign, according to The New York Times.
One is the origin of the special counsel's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
"Mr. Giuliani's planned trip, which has not been previously reported, is part of a monthslong effort by the former New York mayor and a small group of Trump allies working to build interest in the Ukrainian inquiries. Their motivation is to try to discredit the special counsel's investigation; undermine the case against Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's imprisoned former campaign chairman; and potentially to damage Mr. Biden, the early front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination," NYT wrote.
