U.S. President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, says he is canceling plans to visit Ukraine to encourage investigations by the country’s incoming government that he thinks would help Trump politically.
Speaking on the U.S. television channel Fox News, Giuliani said late on May 10 that he was not going 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."
Democrats have criticized Giuliani’s plans to visit Ukraine over the weekend after The New York Times quoted Giuliani as saying he wanted to encourage two investigations by the government of incoming President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
One is the origin of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference and the other is the involvement of 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden's son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler, the head of the House Judiciary Committee, said U.S. politics is in "a sorry state" if the president's lawyer can seek foreign interference in a U.S. election.
Ukraine’s president-elect defeated incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in an April 21 runoff election and is scheduled to be inaugurated in early June.
