U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who has canceled his visit to Ukraine, has named Ukrainian Member of Parliament Serhiy Leshchenko among the U.S. President’s enemies, noting that the Ukrainian lawmaker had provided a fake “black ledger” that allegedly belonged to Ukraine’s Regions Party.
Commenting on his decision to cancel his visit to Ukraine on the U.S. television channel Fox News, Giuliani said he was not going to Ukraine because he thinks he would be “walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president…in some cases enemies of the United States.”
“In one case, [there’s] one already convicted person, who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election. …I’ll give you his name: a gentleman by the name of (Serhiy) Leshchenko, who supplied a ‘black book’ [the so-called ‘black ledger’ of the Regions Party which mentioned U.S. President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort] that was found to be fraudulent and [it was] never used because it was fraudulent, incriminating statement that was totally untrue,” he said.
In addition, Giuliani claims that former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s son received from $3 million to $10 million from a “Russian loving crooked Ukrainian oligarch.”
Leshchenko, in turn, said on Facebook on May 11 on response to Giuliani’s statement: “Giuliani has realized that [Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy] Lutsenko had systematically been deceiving him. Lutsenko (i) lies that the Burisma case was closed over Biden – but it was closed by Lutsenko himself; (ii) lies that the ‘black ledger’ was fraudulent, but there is expert evaluation that it was not. ”
In addition, according to Leshchenko, Lutsenko “lies about the fact that [Director of the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) Artem] Sytnyk and I were convicted for interfering in the elections – but it was an administrative court (hearing)on a claim filed by (MP Boryslav) Rozenblat and the ruling has not entered into force.”
Leshchenko says Lutsenko “has in fact pulled Ukraine into someone else’s war, making us a bargaining chip at the table between Trump and Biden, and he has made it with one goal – to keep his post as prosecutor general.”
