According to a new report from POLITICO, “Justice Department investigators have asked questions about Rudy Giuliani’s work connected to Romania” amid their ongoing criminal investigation of the prominent Trump ally. That indicates that the scope of the investigation is broader than already known, because before, only Giuliani’s Ukraine ties were reported to be under scrutiny. Giuliani is suspected of potentially covertly ferrying the wishes of foreign individuals to Trump when pushing for the then-president to remove Marie Yovanovitch from her post as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. Conducting lobbying work in the U.S. on behalf of foreign interests without notifying federal authorities is illegal.
It's not just Ukraine. Justice Department investigators have asked questions about Rudy Giuliani's work connected to Romania, according to two people familiar with the probe.https://t.co/8ZtRCh9dMq
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 18, 2021
Giuliani has, unsurprisingly, denied the allegations against him, although federal investigators are clearly serious about their efforts, considering the fact that they raided his Manhattan apartment and office last month. Notably, Trump has stayed largely distant from Giuliani’s situation.
As for Giuliani’s connections to Romania, POLITICO reports that in 2018 “Giuliani wrote a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in which he decried the “excesses” of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate and called for… amnesty for people who had been convicted of crimes initiated by that body in recent years.” Giuliani wrote that letter in association with a project of a consulting firm known as the Freeh Group, which paid him for his efforts. Among his firm’s other efforts, former FBI director Louis Freeh — founder of the Freeh Group — had been hired by Romanian property owner Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu in 2016 to work on a real estate fraud case against him.
After getting asked in 2018 whether his letter was connected to Popoviciu, Giuliani said that it was regarding the “Overall situation not any one case,” although that explanation doesn’t exactly seem unquestionable. Either way, the letter seems relatively representative of foreign interests.
As POLITICO explains, if “Giuliani’s Romania work was solely to influence government officials there and did not target American audiences, then he would not have been required to disclose the work to the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” but the breadth of the work is unclear. Apparently, that letter is the only component of Giuliani’s involvement that is publicly known. As investigators look into the matter, Giuliani has been seeking the return of materials seized during their recent raid of his apartment and office.
