President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani responded Monday to allegations made by his former associate Lev Parnas, saying that the Ukrainian-American “didn’t just lie, he lied stupidly.”
Giuliani said he was “heartbroken,” by Parnas and still feels “sorry for him.”
“Lev is someone I was close to. Obviously, I was misled by him — I feel very bad, I was the godfather to his child,” the former New York City mayor said in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Giuliani distanced himself from Parnas after his former friend and business associate began telling various media outlets that he and Giuliani were working at the president’s direction to have former ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired and the Bidens investigated for corruption.
“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas added. “He was aware of all my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the President.”
Speaking with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Giuliani went on to say he was “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,” Giuliani continued. “In fact, 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 Ukraine all throughout the Obama Administration.”
Giuliani then countered several of Parnas’s specific “misrepresentations,” including that a White House meeting he claimed to be in never happened, and that ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) never met with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in Austria in 2018.
Nunes is suing CNN for reporting that Parnas is willing to tell impeachment investigators that Nunes met with Shokin to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, and says the meeting never took place.
“What’s his motivation? His motivation is not to go to prison, the same thing as Michael Cohen,” Giuliani claimed.
The White House will reportedly block any requests for Parnas to testify in the Senate impeachment trial.