THE U.S. Justice Department distanced itself Sunday from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, declaring that department officials would not have met with Giuliani to discuss one of his clients had they known that federal prosecutors in New York were investigating two of his associates.

Several weeks ago, Brian A. Benczkowski, the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and lawyers from the division’s Fraud Section met with Giuliani to discuss a bribery case in which he and other attorneys were representing the defendants.

That meeting took place before the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan publicly charged the two Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with breaking campaign finance laws and trying to unlawfully influence politicians. Parnas and Fruman were part of Giuliani’s effort to push Ukraine for an inquiry into Democrats.

The Justice Department’s public statement Sunday illustrates the unusual and broad set of roles that the president’s personal lawyer has played in the scandal that has engulfed the White House.

Even as Giuliani allegedly ran a shadow foreign policy campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate the president’s political enemies — which is now at the heart of an impeachment inquiry against Trump — he and his business associates were under criminal investigation for unlawfully wielding political influence.

Now that tie to the Justice Department seems to be gone, and Giuliani himself is a person of interest in at least two federal investigations.

While The New York Times and other publications have reported that Giuliani is being investigated by prosecutors in Manhattan, the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have declined to confirm or deny an investigation into him.

Eighteen months ago, with Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election in full swing, Trump hired former New York City Mayor Giuliani to serve as his personal attorney. The president made this choice, presumably, for three reasons. First, Giuliani is a famous Republican lawyer whom Trump knew well. Second, Giuliani was very, very available. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, no other lawyers of note wanted the job. Trump settled on his counsel for the most important legal fight of his life almost by process of elimination.

His task, Giuliani said at the time, was to bring Mueller’s work to a “resolution,” and he predicted he’d need “a week or two” to do it.

In fact, the probe would not end for another year after that.

Since then, Giuliani has gone from defending a client under investigation to being the subject of an investigation himself.

As The New York Times reports, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are looking at his involvement in Trump’s decision to recall Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, earlier this year. According to The Wall Street Journal, Giuliani did so because Yovanovitch was interfering with his behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade Ukraine to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 challenger, former vice president Joe Biden — the scandal that prompted House Democrats to open an impeachment inquiry last month.

Giuliani first rose to fame within the same outfit now investigating him — the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which former U.S. President Ronald Reagan appointed him to lead in 1983. He parlayed his reputation as a hard-charging, mob-busting prosecutor into eight years as mayor of New York City.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center changed his political fortunes forever. Like a wartime president, Giuliani saw his approval rating skyrocket to an all-time high of 79 percent, even with only a few months remaining in his term.

After that, Giuliani became a sort of heroic elder statesman of the Republican Party and, as the Bush administration’s war on terror raged overseas, a solemn reminder for supporters of the reasons for fighting it.

In a 2006 poll, he was rated as the nation’s most popular politician of either party. (Illinois senator Barack Obama and Arizona senator John McCain finished second and third, respectively.) But despite a sizable early lead in the polls, his 2008 presidential bid flamed out due to both a series of lingering scandals from his mayoralty and also a general public weariness for his act. “Rudy Giuliani — there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence,” said then senator Joe Biden during a Democratic primary debate. “A noun, and a verb, and 9/11. I mean, there’s nothing else!”

His career in politics seemingly over, Giuliani returned to the private practice of law and busied himself with his work at a security consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, which he founded in 2002. He would not really return to the national scene until 2016, when he became one of the few party-establishment backers of fellow famous New Yorker Trump.

“Donald’s a very, very good friend,” Giuliani told CNN in April 2019. “I think he’d be the person I would like to see win.” The two shared a lengthy history: While Giuliani was the city’s bombastic mayor, Trump was king of its gossip pages. They went to Yankees games together and attended each other’s third weddings. Giuliani even spoke at the 1999 funeral of Donald’s father, Fred.

Although Trump passed him over for a Cabinet position — Giuliani reportedly made the shortlist for Secretary of State — the president kept his old friend around in a hodgepodge of roles, putting him in charge of a cybersecurity working group and seeking his advice on implementing the first iterations of the Muslim ban. When longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen became the subject of a criminal probe that would eventually land him in prison, Giuliani, already hanging around in the White House’s general vicinity, was a natural candidate to replace him.

It is in his newfound capacity as Trump’s globe-trotting henchman, apparently, that Giuliani became embroiled in the Ukraine mess. During a series of clandestine meetings this summer, he began pushing for recently elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation of the Biden family to boost Trump’s chances at re-election.

Giuliani’s theory of the case is that as vice president, Joe Biden urged Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company whose owner was suspected of corruption. The former mayor also wanted the Zelensky administration to look into a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

There is no evidence that this version of events is true; in fact, Biden called for Shokin’s ouster because of Shokin’s refusal to do the work of investigating corruption. While lobbying Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, to open the aforementioned investigation, Giuliani referred to him as a “much more honest guy” than Shokin, perhaps hoping to curry favor with Lutsenko.

When Lutsenko concluded that the Biden family had done no wrong, a frustrated Giuliani changed his mind, asserting that Shokin was the good one all along.

As part of his sleuthing, Giuliani also compiled a dossier of disinformation about the Bidens and Yovanovitch, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and says he delivered it to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in March. Pompeo, Giuliani claimed, promised to investigate.

When the State Department inspector general handed that file over to Congress, lawmakers were baffled by what it contained. “The whole thing looks rather amateurish to me,” Maryland Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin told NBC News. “It looks like a collection of some newspaper articles that appear to have been coordinated, some e-mails, and then basically a lot of conspiracy theories.”

In a now infamous July call with Zelensky, Trump urged his counterpart to cooperate with his TV lawyer turned hobbyist diplomat as soon as possible, with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid and a potential invitation to the White House hanging in the balance. “Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man,” the president said, according to the White House’s notes of the conversation. “I will tell Rudy and Attorney General [William] Barr to call.”

Last month, when a whistleblower complaint caused that call to metastasize into a full-blown impeachment inquiry, Giuliani entered what appears to be the final act of his political career: submarining a presidency. “Rudy — he did all of this,” an anonymous U.S. official put it to The Washington Post. “This shitshow that we’re in — it’s him injecting himself into the process.”(SD-Agencies)