Breaking: Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denied feeling pressure from U.S. officials or Trump proxies to open questionable corruption investigations
Petro Poroshenko, who was Ukraine’s president until May and dealt with both the Obama and Trump administrations, said in a rare interview with The Times on Tuesday that he never felt pressure from President Trump or his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to open questionable corruption investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden.
But he added that if federal prosecutors working in his government had received such requests — as former prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko claims he did — he would not necessarily have been informed. At the time of the July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Zelensky for the Biden investigation — which Trump referred to as a “favor” — the U.S. president had also put a hold on $400 million in aid to Ukraine. Those actions are now the subject of a House impeachment inquiry. Trump insists the withholding of the aid was not related to his request that Ukraine investigate one of his leading 2020 political rivals.
Asked if Ukraine possesses its own account of the phone call with Trump, Zelensky said it was “the same text.” He did not elaborate. “Ukraine should not be involved,” he said in the interview. “I hate the idea that mistakes involved Ukraine in an internal political matter.” Although he said both American and Ukrainian sides shared blamed, he did not dispute a generally held notion that Zelensky, a former actor who won an upset victory against Poroshenko, is a political neophyte who was caught off guard by Trump.
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