Rudy Giuliani denied a report that said he received a warning from the FBI in late 2019 that he was a target of Russian disinformation.
The Washington Post cited “people familiar with the matter” in reporting late Thursday that Giuliani received a warning about a Russian influence operation aimed at perpetuating “falsehoods” about now-President Joe Biden ahead of a planned trip to Kyiv, joined by a team from One America News, during which he met with Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who has been accused by the United States of being a Russian agent.
Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City who was former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer at the time of the alleged FBI warning, was asked on Friday to react to that report during an interview with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast.
“What they are referring to in the Washington Post article never took place,” Giuliani insisted, claiming that the bureau never reached out to him in person, in writing, or by phone.
“I can’t be more clear. I never got a briefing from the FBI about the connections of the people in Ukraine,” he said. Earlier in the interview, Giuliani said, “At no time did the FBI brief me about Russian connections of anyone, anywhere.”
The report, for which the FBI declined to comment, came a day after federal investigators executed search warrants at Giuliani’s New York City apartment and office and seized his electronic devices as part of a criminal investigation into whether he acted as an unregistered foreign agent. Manhattan federal prosecutors are said to be looking into his communications with Ukrainian officials.
Giuliani, who in the lead-up to the 2020 election was known to have sought damaging information on the Bidens in Ukraine, insists he never represented a foreign national and claims the materials seized by the FBI are “exculpatory” evidence. He also has said he had no idea Derkach, who has denied working for any foreign intelligence agencies, was a Russian agent.
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Giuliani told Bannon the “only briefing I ever got about Ukraine was much earlier, and it came from the White House, and it concerned the meeting that I had scheduled with the president of Ukraine. And I was told that two of the three people there were basically crooked and couldn’t be trusted. It had nothing to do with Russia, Russia connections. It was not the FBI, it was the White House people.”
He did acknowledge contact with the FBI, but only involving what he described as “the false, phony frame-ups of the president that they were involved in.”
Another person, Sen. Ron Johnson, was named in the Washington Post report as someone who received a “defensive briefing.” The Wisconsin Republican, who, along with Sen. Chuck Grassley, investigated the foreign business dealings of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, acknowledged to the outlet he did receive a briefing about Russian disinformation in August 2020, adding, in part, it “was completely useless and unnecessary (since I was fully aware of the dangers of Russian disinformation).”
