Investigators are looking for information beyond Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine work.
It’s not just Ukraine. Justice Department investigators have asked questions about Rudy Giuliani’s work connected to Romania, according to two people familiar with the probe into former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
Last month, FBI agents raided Giuliani’s New York City apartment and office to seize phones and computers as part of an investigation of whether Giuliani violated the law in his work for foreign entities, including the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Giuliani has said that he “never, ever represented a foreign national” and says he specifically puts in his contracts that he won’t lobby on behalf of or represent foreign entities.
In 2018, Giuliani wrote a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in which he decried the “excesses” of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate and called for an amnesty for people who had been convicted of crimes initiated by that body in recent years.
What Giuliani didn’t mention in the letter was that he wrote it on behalf of the Freeh Group, a consulting firm started by former FBI director Louis Freeh, which paid the former mayor a retainer to work on the Romania project. In 2018, Giuliani declined to reveal the amount, and his letter is the only Romania-related work he did that is known to the public. Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, a Romanian property mogul who was sentenced to seven years in prison in a real estate fraud case, had hired Freeh in 2016 to review the evidence against him. The Freeh Group found “numerous factual and legal deficiencies” in the legal case that led to his conviction. A spokesperson for the Romanian president told POLITICO that Iohannis never replied to the letter.
Popoviciu in 2015 had also hired Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, to help put an end to the fraud investigation against him. Hunter Biden had reportedly stopped working for Popoviciu by the time Giuliani got involved in 2018. Giuliani has severely criticized Hunter Biden for his ties to foreign companies, including in Ukraine and China.
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Federal investigators are looking for information beyond Rudy Giuliani's Ukraine work, which means the probe has taken a wider lens than previously known. https://t.co/tRUlhyGw04
— POLITICO (@politico) May 18, 2021
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