Giuliani says he was ‘misled’ by Parnas

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said Monday evening that he had been “misled” by Lev Parnas, a close associate who has accused him of conducting an effort to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine.

In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Giuliani asserted that Parnas has made “so many” “misrepresentations” of the facts surrounding Trump’s efforts to convince Ukraine’s president to open a criminal investigation into Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, and his son Hunter.

“Lev is someone … I was close to,” Giuliani said. “Obviously, I was misled by him. I feel very bad.”

“I’m not going to respond to him for each and every one of the misrepresentations he’s made, because there are so many. If I’m called as a witness, I’m prepared to do it,” he continued.

“In fact,” the former New York City mayor added, “I wouldn’t mind being called as a witness for a lot of reasons, including being able to reveal the unbelievable amount of corruption that went on between the Democratic Party and the Ukraine all throughout the Obama administration.”

Trump’s dealings with Ukraine are at the center of the Democrats’ impeachment efforts against him.

Giuliani and allies of the president have asserted that Trump’s intention was to fight corruption in Kyiv.   

Parnas, however, has claimed in recent interviews that the efforts were meant to find compromising information for the Trump campaign and investigate an unfounded claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.

“It wasn’t supposed to be a corruption announcement, it [had] to be about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Burisma,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week, referring to a planned announcement of an investigation into energy giant Burisma Holdings originally set to be delivered by Ukraine’s president.