A day after announcing plans to visit Ukraine in the hopes of meeting with the incoming president to push Trump’s political agenda, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Friday called the trip off because, he claimed, it “was a set up” concocted by “enemies of the United States.” Speaking to Fox News’ Shannon Bream, he said he had decided not to go “because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president, in some cases enemies of the United States, and in one case an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election.”
On Thursday, Giuliani had said he planned to meet with Ukraine’s incoming president, Volodymyr Zelensky, precisely to push for further investigation into Ukrainians who supposedly helped the Democrats in the 2016 election, along with a separate probe into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter and their supposed connections to a Ukrainian oligarch. While he decided to back out of the trip “in order to remove any political suggestion,” he said he is still “actually quite confident that the facts with regard to former Vice President Joe Biden are so compelling that there’s no way he gets from here to the election without this being investigated.”
