While he represents the president for free, he travels the world consulting, giving speeches, and building his brand.
\nWhen Rudy Giuliani traveled to Ukraine\u2019s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, in November 2017 to advise the mayor, an unconventional scene awaited him. In an anteroom outside the mayor\u2019s office, his pet parrot, Johnny, perched in a large metal cage. Giuliani doesn\u2019t speak Russian, so Johnny\u2019s standard squawk to visitors\u2014\u201cPrivet!\u201d (Russian for \u201chello\u201d)\u2014was perhaps lost on him. But the mayor\u2019s security precautions certainly were not.
\nAn armed policeman in a bulletproof vest guarded the anteroom, where a motley collection of visitors waited with Johnny to see the mayor, Hennadiy Kernes, who\u2019s ruled over this city less than an hour from the Russian border for the past nine years. Beyond the bird lay another waiting area with bodyguards, all with the blunt, ex-mixed-martial-artist look common to the profession in the former Soviet Union. Inside the mayor\u2019s office were a large lion and a small lynx, stuffed.
\n\u201cI\u2019m not surprised by heavy-duty security anywhere,\u201d Giuliani said when I asked him recently what he thought of the bodyguards around Kernes. \u201cI do a lot of work in dangerous places.\u201d Giuliani said he was in the country, for his second visit in less than a year, as a private citizen to advise Kharkiv on security. But he was also serving at the time as President Trump\u2019s cybersecurity adviser, and Ukrainian TV headlined it as a \u201cvisit by Trump\u2019s adviser.\u201d On both visits, Giuliani met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who\u2019s now fighting an uphill battle for reelection.
\nOn a freezing January day, I visited Mayor Kernes, 59, in his office while a Russian soap opera played on a large TV. He\u2019s been in a wheelchair since April 2014, when an unknown hit man shot him while he was jogging near the forest on the city\u2019s outskirts. Before the assassination attempt, the mayor maintained an active Instagram account on which he posted photos of himself flashing his expensive watches, traveling on private jets, and meeting with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2017 for \u201cextrajudicial killing, torture, and other gross violations\u201d of human rights. Kernes himself was a close ally of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced from the country by the Maidan Revolution in February 2014 and fled to Russia.
\nSpeaking in a gravelly voice, Kernes explained that he\u2019d wanted to tap Giuliani\u2019s vast experience. Giuliani advised him to create an emergency service akin to 911. \u201cGiuliani met with President Poroshenko, and with the support of the president we decided to go ahead,\u201d he said, sipping tea.
\nThe story of how Giuliani ended up advising a mayor in eastern Ukraine is a tangled one. Kernes wasn\u2019t paying Giuliani; instead, his one-year contract, the value of which no one involved will discuss, was funded mostly by a Ukrainian-Russian minigarch named Pavel Fuks, who moved back to Ukraine in 2015 after about 20 years in Moscow, where he made a fortune in real estate and banking. In the mid-2000s, Fuks had held talks with Trump about building a Trump Tower Moscow, but they couldn\u2019t agree on a deal.
\nI visited Fuks in Kiev, where he, too, had armed bodyguards outside his office door. A 47-year-old Kharkiv native who\u2019s been friends with Kernes for 30 years, Fuks said he\u2019d hired Giuliani to give back to his hometown. \u201cGiuliani\u2019s company provides lobbying services, and they are very strong in security,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s a star.\u201d
\nThe Ukrainian gig is one slice of a globe-trotting consulting business Giuliani has continued to pursue while serving first as a key campaign surrogate for Trump, then as his cybersecurity adviser, and finally as his personal lawyerduring special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Now that Attorney General William Barr has reported that Mueller didn\u2019t find Trump\u2019s campaign to have knowingly conspired with the Russian government and didn\u2019t draw a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed justice, Giuliani is taking a victory lap. His success in shielding Trump from an in-person interview with Mueller may have helped the president steer clear of an obstruction charge, an accomplishment that could make Giuliani\u2019s currency as a consultant even more valuable around the world.
\nLong lauded as the prosecutor who skewered the New York Mafia and once known as \u201cAmerica\u2019s mayor\u201d for leading New York after Sept. 11, Giuliani is still courting clients for security contracts such as the one in Kharkiv. He\u2019s made millions of dollars while acting as Trump\u2019s unpaid consigliere\u2014$9.5 million in 2017 and $5 million in 2018, according to disclosures from his ongoing divorce proceedings with his third wife, Judith Nathan. At the age of 74, Giuliani has eschewed a quiet retirement in favor of life in the limelight. \u201cIf I retired, I would shrivel up,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat I do is enormously exciting.\u201d In addition to Ukraine, in the past two years he\u2019s given speeches and done consulting and legal work in Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, and Uruguay, among other countries.
\nMuch about the Trump presidency is unprecedented, but Giuliani\u2019s role is particularly unusual. His work abroad led seven Democratic senators in September to request that the U.S. Department of Justice review whether he should be disclosing his activities under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires registration by individuals and organizations acting as agents of foreign principals \u201cin a political or quasi political capacity.\u201d FARA was rarely a hot topic until 2017, when Mueller indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates for failing to register as foreign agents as required.
\n\u201cAs President Trump\u2019s personal attorney, Mr. Giuliani communicates in private with the president and his senior staff on a regular basis,\u201d the senators wrote to the Justice Department. \u201cWithout further review, it is impossible to know whether Mr. Giuliani is lobbying U.S. government officials on behalf of foreign clients.\u201d
\nGiuliani has consistently denied lobbying U.S. officials on behalf of Ukraine or any other foreign government. He told me that most of his work has been in the form of consulting within foreign countries, which FARA experts say typically wouldn\u2019t trigger an obligation to file as a foreign agent. \u201cMost of our contracts involve giving a state within the national government a security plan to reduce crime, investigate terrorism, secure critical infrastructure,\u201d he said. In Ukraine, he said, he advised only on security issues, not on how to promote Kharkiv\u2019s interests in the U.S.
\n\u201cIf I retired, I would shrivel up. What I do is enormously exciting\u201d
\nWhen I first called Giuliani in mid-February, he said over a crackling line that he was at a Warsaw conference on Iran, a U.S. government-led summit at which Trump administration officials urged European allies to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. It was the first of two phone calls; in both, Giuliani said he had five minutes, then spoke for almost 45. His still-sharp mind and natural argumentativeness were evident, but he also misstated the dates of his many recent foreign trips.
\nGiuliani said he\u2019d come to Poland to give a speech about Iran, and he defended his dual roles working closely for Trump and foreign clients, noting that he spells out in his contracts with those clients that he doesn\u2019t lobby the U.S. government. \u201cThere\u2019s no conflict. What\u2019s the conflict?\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t ask the president for anything for them ever. I\u2019ve never represented them in front of the U.S. government. I don\u2019t peddle influence. I don\u2019t have to. I make a good deal of money as a lawyer and as a security consultant.\u201d
\nThe question of conflict arises, in part, because Giuliani keeps popping up in world capitals to make pronouncements that dovetail with Trump\u2019s foreign policy positions. While in Warsaw, just outside the official Iran conference, he spoke at a rally organized by the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a political front controlled by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, which has agitated for regime change in Tehran. It was a cold and gray day when Giuliani, his trademark U.S.-flag pin affixed to his lapel, stood at a podium in front of hundreds of people waving Iranian flags. \u201cIn order to have peace and stability in the Middle East, there has to be a major change in the theocratic dictatorship in Iran,\u201d he said. \u201cIt must end and end quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Giuliani told me he\u2019s worked with the MEK since 2008. At the time, the U.S. Department of State designated the group a foreign terrorist organization, describing it as \u201ccultlike\u201d and saying members were forced to take a vow of \u201ceternal divorce\u201d and participate in weekly \u201cideological cleansings.\u201d When the State Department revoked the designation in 2012, it nevertheless expressed serious concerns about the organization, \u201cparticularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its members.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Giuliani isn\u2019t alone in stumping for the organization. The MEK has a history of enlisting prominent American politicians on both sides of the aisle, including national security adviser John Bolton\u2014and paying $20,000 or much more for a brief appearance<\/strong>. Giuliani\u2019s advocacy has been quite open. In January 2017 he joined almost two dozen other former U.S. officials in writing a letter to the president urging him to open \u201cdialogue\u201d with the NCRI. After he became Trump\u2019s personal lawyer in April 2018, Giuliani gave speeches at several MEK events, including a Paris rally during which the French security services foiled a bomb plot they blamed on Iranian intelligence. Giuliani appears to revel in his rock-star status at the group\u2019s events. At the 2018 Iran Uprising Summit at a hotel in Manhattan\u2019s Times Square in September, MEK supporters greeted Giuliani with a standing ovation and whoops and whistles. \u201cI hope I say enough offensive things so they put me on that list to kill me, if I\u2019m not already there,\u201d he said to laughter. His speeches railing against Iran echo Trump\u2019s hard-line stance on Tehran but go further by explicitly calling for the regime\u2019s ouster.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s wildly inappropriate for Giuliani to continue to openly associate with\u201d the MEK, says Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. \u201cThose who have any association with them really can\u2019t claim ignorance of how bizarre and cultlike the group is. This is one of those cases that in any other administration, Republican or Democrat, it would be a front-page scandal.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
His anti-Iran rhetoric didn\u2019t stop him from working for Reza Zarrab, the man accused of orchestrating a $1 billion money laundering scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions
\nDan Pickard, a partner and FARA specialist at the Washington law firm Wiley Rein LLP, declines to discuss Giuliani specifically, but he says that if someone is paid by a foreign political group to give a speech in the U.S. to influence policy, he should file as a foreign agent. \u201cFARA is so much broader than just lobbying,\u201d he says. Giuliani told me he\u2019s getting paid not by the MEK but rather by an American organization of Iranian dissidents. Is it the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, which is allied with the MEK, I asked? \u201cI can\u2019t remember the exact name,\u201d Giuliani said. He dismissed concerns about FARA, saying, \u201cIt\u2019s no different than if you did work for an American Jewish group that has strong views on Israel.\u201d
\nHis anti-Iran rhetoric didn\u2019t stop him from working for Reza Zarrab, the man accused of orchestrating a $1 billion money laundering scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions. In February 2017, while acting as Trump\u2019s cybersecurity adviser, Giuliani traveled to Turkey to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in hopes of resolving Zarrab\u2019s case. A Turkish-Iranian gold trader, Zarrab had been arrested in the U.S. and accused of helping Iran dodge U.S. sanctions by processing hundreds of millions of dollars through his network of companies. At the time, there was dismay in Turkey over Trump\u2019s Muslim travel ban, and Giuliani had recently told Fox News he\u2019d advised on the policy during the president\u2019s campaign. Giuliani said he tried to negotiate a deal for Zarrab to return to Turkey as part of a prisoner swap. It didn\u2019t work. Instead, Zarrab pleaded guilty to money laundering, bribery, and sanctions violations and became a U.S. government witness against a banker in the case. He hasn\u2019t been sentenced, and it\u2019s unclear if he remains in federal custody.
\nGiuliani\u2019s role shocked many, including U.S. District Judge Richard Berman, who oversaw the Zarrab case<\/strong>. \u201cI knew the old Rudy,\u201d says Berman, who was appointed by Giuliani as a family court judge in 1995. \u201cThere seems to be somewhat of a disconnect between the old Rudy and the new Rudy.\u201d In an interview with Courthouse News in June, Berman went further: \u201cI am still stunned by the fact that Rudy was hired to be\u2014and he very actively pursued being\u2014the \u2018go-between\u2019 between President Trump and Turkey\u2019s President Erdogan in an unprecedented effort to terminate this federal criminal case.\u201d
\nLawyers are usually exempt from requirements to file as a foreign agent, but that exemption may not apply in this case, according to Ben Freeman, who studies influence operations at the Center for International Policy in Washington. \u201cThere\u2019s an exemption for lawyers, but none of their activities can go outside of the courtroom,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce you do something FARA would constitute as a political activity, just one thing, that would prevent you from being able to claim that exemption.\u201d Berman says Giuliani never stepped foot into the courtroom during the sanctions case.
\nSounding like an annoyed prosecutor, Giuliani disputed that interpretation of the law. \u201cI didn\u2019t represent the Turkish government,\u201d he said. \u201cI represented a single individual who was in jail, and he wanted to see if he could get a prisoner exchange with the Turkish government.\u201d
\nGiuliani markets himself globally as the supercop who reduced crime in New York City using the \u201cbroken windows\u201d strategy, which pursued crackdowns on minor offenses to prevent bigger ones. Crime rates did drop dramatically in the city while he was mayor, though the cause remains hotly debated; some experts attribute it as much to the economic boom of the 1990s and to a fall in unemployment. During his time as mayor, Giuliani was also heavily criticized for police brutality and the shootings of unarmed black men, a record that was largely forgotten when he emerged from the wreckage of the Twin Towers to speak for the city and was applauded worldwide for his composure and courage.
\nOnce his second term as mayor ended, Giuliani sought to quickly capitalize on his fame. Early in 2001, during divorce proceedings with his second wife, Donna Hanover, Giuliani\u2019s lawyer claimed his client had just $7,000 to his name. Giuliani did, however, have a $3 million book deal. He went on to set up a series of companies: Giuliani Partners LLC, a management consulting firm for governments and businesses; Giuliani Security & Safety LLC, another consulting business, this one focused on law and order; and Giuliani Capital Advisors LLC, an investment bank (which he sold to Macquarie Group Ltd. in 2007). As private firms, they don\u2019t have to disclose how much they earn.
\nWithin a few years, Giuliani had made many more millions. In 2002, Mexico City agreed to pay him $4.3 million for his advice on fighting crime. In 2004 he traveled for the first time to Ukraine. He also visited Russia, where he met with Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov; it\u2019s unclear if Giuliani was paid for the visit or who financed the trip. He was also on the speaking circuit, routinely pulling in $100,000 to $200,000 per speech. When he made a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2007, he reported earning more than $11 million in speaking fees alone in the preceding year and a half, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
\nGiuliani lost the nomination and returned to his peripatetic life as a consultant and after-dinner speaker. \u201cSince the day I left being mayor, I\u2019ve given over 1,000 speeches,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019ve been in at least 80 countries. Giuliani Security & Safety has worked in 30 different countries, probably three, four different ones per year.\u201d
\nHe\u2019s convinced dozens of clients around the world, from small-town mayors to presidents, that what worked in New York can work anywhere. In Brazil, for example, the state of Amazonas signed a $1.6 million contract with Giuliani Security & Safety in February 2018 to improve border security and policing. (The arrangement is now under investigation by local prosecutors. John Huvane, chief executive officer of Giuliani Security & Safety, says the probe isn\u2019t targeting the firm: \u201cThey\u2019re investigating the Brazilian process for picking us.\u201d) In Colombia, where Giuliani said he\u2019s probably done the most consulting on security, his firm signed a five-month, $295,000 contract in 2015 to help police design a crime-reduction strategy in Medell\u00edn called puntos calientes (\u201chot spots\u201d). Huvane says the plan reduced crime in Medell\u00edn by 42 percent while the company was on the job, though the homicide rate has worsened since it left. Luis Felipe Davila, a security researcher based in Medell\u00edn, says Giuliani Security & Safety didn\u2019t address the structural issues behind the city\u2019s crime.
\nGiuliani\u2019s consulting has given him access to a unique network of global politicians, some of whom sought his advice when Trump won the presidency. He\u2019s kept close ties with Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia\u2019s president when Trump was elected, which may have come in handy when the Colombian government was looking for guidance on what to expect from the new administration. In November 2016, two days after the presidential election, Giuliani spoke with Santos and assured him that Trump was committed to maintaining aid levels set by President Obama, according to a person familiar with the conversation. On Nov. 11, Santos tweeted, \u201cI spoke with President-elect Donald Trump. We agreed to strengthen the special and strategic relationship between Colombia and the United States.\u201d Giuliani has returned to Colombia at least once since Trump became president, delivering the keynote address at a security conference in Medell\u00edn in December 2017.
\nGiuliani said he doesn\u2019t recall talking about Trump with Santos, who stepped down in August. \u201cI probably have assured them at various times that our government is supportive,\u201d he said. \u201cI have never done anything to help Colombia with the U.S. government formally or informally.\u201d
\nGiuliani\u2019s foreign clients may be more necessary than ever. When he started working as Trump\u2019s lawyer in April 2018, he agreed to do so for free. Within weeks he\u2019d resigned from the law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, which he joined in 2016 as global chair of its cybersecurity and crisis-management practice\u2014a position that provided him from $4 million to $6 million in annual income, according to his divorce proceedings. And Giuliani lives well. At a court hearing in November, a divorce lawyer for Nathan said the former mayor spent $12,000 on cigars and $7,000 on fountain pens over five months. Giuliani and his future ex-wife calculated their personal monthly expenses at about $230,000 each. Their bitterness erupted into the open during a March hearing at which they squabbled over how to share a house they own in the Hamptons, and the judge told them to stay away from each other at a Florida golf club where both are members.
\nAs Trump\u2019s personal lawyer, Giuliani has sometimes given cable-TV interviews sprinkled with contradictions that have often left viewers baffled. When he was asked on NBC\u2019s Meet the Press in August why Trump shouldn\u2019t agree to be interviewed by Mueller, Giuliani said the president risked falling into a perjury trap even if he told the truth. In an exchange that may go down as one of the Trump era\u2019s most memorable, Chuck Todd, the host, responded, \u201cTruth is truth.\u201d To which Giuliani replied: \u201cTruth isn\u2019t truth.\u201d
\nTo Giuliani\u2019s admirers, Barr\u2019s summaryof the Mueller report makes any missteps immaterial. \u201cHe\u2019s as smart and quick as he was 25 years ago,\u201d says Jon Sale, a former assistant special Watergate prosecutor who went to law school with Giuliani. \u201cMost of the time you judge a lawyer\u2019s performance by the result. In this case the result was a home run.\u201d
\nGiuliani and Trump have known each other since the late 1980s. Trump supported him during his various political campaigns, and they were close enough that in 2000, as part of an annual parody show, Giuliani dressed in drag in a skit with the future president. A video clip shows Trump nuzzling Giuliani\u2019s bosom as the mayor exclaims, \u201cOh, you dirty boy, you!\u201d After Giuliani endorsed Trump in April 2016, he became a frequent campaign surrogate and one of the few people to defend the candidate after the leak of a recording in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by the genitals. Giuliani\u2019s son, Andrew, who now works in the White House office of public liaison, \u201cconsiders Trump an uncle,\u201d Giuliani told me. Many people expected Giuliani to take a plum post in the administration, but he said he bowed out early from any cabinet positions. He denied that his foreign work had complicated his prospects of becoming secretary of state. \u201cMy soon-to-be ex-wife didn\u2019t want me to do it, because of the significant reduction in pay,\u201d he said.
\nAs it is, Giuliani\u2019s consulting work has often left him sounding like a wannabe secretary, sometimes creating headaches for the State Department. Just a few days after his \u201ctruth isn\u2019t truth\u201d declaration, Giuliani penned a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, warning that the country\u2019s battle against corruption had gone too far. Giuliani said he was paid to write the letter at the request of Louis Freeh, a former director of the FBI. Freeh represents Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian American real estate investor convicted in 2016 over a land deal and sentenced to seven years in prison. Giuliani\u2019s letter didn\u2019t mention Popoviciu by name, but Freeh issued a statement in 2017 saying the conviction wasn\u2019t supported by \u201ceither the facts or the law.\u201d
\n\u201cI got paid by Louis Freeh, not by anybody else,\u201d Giuliani said. \u201cIt was all directed to the Romanian government, not the U.S. government. Therefore, it doesn\u2019t require any foreign agent representation. I was working as a subcontractor.\u201d
\nWas he concerned his letter might be perceived as a message from the White House, given his other hat as Trump\u2019s lawyer? \u201cOf course it wasn\u2019t,\u201d Giuliani said. \u201cI am not his White House counsel.\u201d The State Department distanced itselffrom Giuliani\u2019s actions: The U.S. Embassy in Bucharest issued a statement saying it \u201cdoesn\u2019t comment on the opinions or conclusions of an individual American citizen\u201d and reaffirmed its support for Romania\u2019s fight against corruption. Freeh declined to comment for this story.
\nIn October, while representing Trump in the Russia probe, Giuliani gave a speech at a conference in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, organized with the support of the Armenian government and the Eurasian Economic Commission, which brings together Russia and four other former Soviet countries and is broadly seen as Putin\u2019s attempt to reassert Moscow\u2019s influence. Giuliani spoke about cybersecurity right after speeches by Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov and Sergei Glazyev, a Kremlin adviser the U.S. sanctioned for his role in Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea and subsequent conflict with Ukraine.
\nGiuliani said he never met Glazyev at the conference and wasn\u2019t concerned about attending the event alongside a sanctioned Russian official. \u201cI didn\u2019t know who he was. I found out afterwards,\u201d he said, declining to say how much he was paid for the speech or who paid him. \u201cI got up, gave my speech, and walked out.\u201d
\nGiuliani\u2019s ties to Ukraine go back more than a decade. In 2008 he advised Vitali Klitschko, a former boxing champion who was campaigning for mayor of Kiev, on what lessons the city could draw from New York. Giuliani described Klitschko, who won the office on his third try, in 2014, as a friend. In June 2017, Giuliani was paid by another prominent Ukrainian, billionaire Victor Pinchuk, to speak at a conference in Kiev, much to the annoyance of fellow oligarch Fuks, who thought his deal with Giuliani was exclusive. For his lecture, titled \u201cGlobal Challenges, the Role of the U.S., and the Place of Ukraine,\u201d Giuliani argued before more than 600 people that U.S. foreign policy should be focused on making sure the Ukrainian government regains control over the east from Russian separatists. On the same trip he met with the Ukrainian president, prime minister, foreign minister, and prosecutor general. \u201cI didn\u2019t advise them\u201d on anything, Giuliani told me, declining to comment on his lecture fee. \u201cIt was nothing to do with President Trump.\u201d
\nLess than two weeks later, Poroshenko traveled to Washington and sat down in the Oval Office for what the White House described as a brief \u201cdrop-in\u201d ahead of Trump\u2019s meeting with Putin the next month at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. A White House transcript said the two discussed \u201csupport for the peaceful resolution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine.\u201d (Giuliani said he had nothing to do with setting up the encounter.)
\nAt the time, Trump\u2019s views on Ukraine and its war with Russia were unclear. He\u2019d spent much of the campaign and early months in office sounding conciliatory toward the Kremlin, a prospect that had many Ukrainian politicians worried Trump might side with Russia\u2014and especially that he might lift sanctions on their adversary, mindful of Poroshenko\u2019s perceived support for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton leading up to the election. These fears had prompted outreach by Ukrainian politicians and businessmen; just prior to the inauguration, the Ukrainian government signed a $600,000 contract with the BGR Group, a Washington lobbying firm founded by prominent Republicans.
\nFuks also traveled to D.C. to attend events around the inauguration. He didn\u2019t meet the president. A few months later, Fuks signed the contract with Giuliani to advise Kernes. Giuliani said he\u2019d met Fuks twice in New York before seeing him again in Kharkiv, but he expressed surprise when I told him Fuks had met with Trump several times in the mid-2000s to discuss a Trump Tower Moscow deal.
\nWhen I met Fuks at his dark-panneled office in central Kiev, he talked expansively about his work with Giuliani but wouldn\u2019t say how much he\u2019d paid him. He dismissed a local press report that Giuliani received $400,000 just to give a speech during the trip. Everyone involved has a different understanding of Giuliani\u2019s role. Fuks recalled talking to Giuliani about relations between the U.S. and Ukraine: \u201cHe said, \u2018Ukraine is our partner, we will help.\u2019 He has a very positive attitude toward Ukraine, so he undertook to lobby for us.\u201d
\n\u201cI got clients before I represented President Trump, and I\u2019m gonna get clients afterwards\u201d
\nGiuliani is adamant he doesn\u2019t lobby. He explained that Fuks and Kernes wanted his advice because \u201cthey had been invaded by allegedly Russians and were afraid they\u2019d be invaded again.\u201d Fuks and Kernes said nothing to me about the Russia threat prompting their interest in bringing Giuliani to Kharkiv, and in fact Kernes faced allegations of siding with pro-Russia separatists during the Maidan Revolution\u2014Ukrainian prosecutors questioned him about reports that he kidnapped and beat up anti-Russian activists. Kernes said his political enemies had cooked up the allegations, and criminal proceedings were dropped in 2018 after local prosecutors failed to pursue the case. After the questioning, he stopped supporting Yanukovych and backed Poroshenko, who won the presidency later that year.
\nKernes is a wealthy man. He earns an official salary of about $32,000 a year as mayor, a position he\u2019s held since 2010. Before then, he was president of a local refinery and a member of the city council for eight years. In recent mandatory filings he declared that he had almost $2 million in cash and had received $674,000 in dividends from an asset management company. He also reported owning shares in a local energy distributor and a bank. Despite his substantial influence in Kharkiv, and despite a lengthy report from Giuliani Security & Safety, the Kharkiv emergency service center remains unbuilt.
\nTransparency International calls Ukraine the most corrupt country in Europe after Russia, but Giuliani brushes off concerns about taking on clients there. \u201cI do business honestly,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m doing the same things today as I was five years ago. They haven\u2019t changed as a result of my representing the president.\u201d Whatever he does next, whether it\u2019s continuing as Trump\u2019s personal lawyer or going back to full-time consulting, Giuliani is confident the business will continue to flow. \u201cI got clients before I represented President Trump, and I\u2019m gonna get clients afterwards,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter I stop representing him, I\u2019ll be doing more work overseas, because I\u2019ll have more time.\u201d \u2014With Daryna Krasnolutska, Ezra Fieser, Luiza Ferraz, Erik Larson, and Andrew Martin
\nBloomberg, By Stephanie Baker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s wildly inappropriate for Giuliani to continue to openly associate with\u201d the MEK, says Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. \u201cThose who have any association with them really can\u2019t claim ignorance of how bizarre and cultlike the group is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[85,642,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[109],"class_list":["post-9610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-proxy-force","tag-mujahedin-khalq-terrorism","tag-paid-advocacy-for-mko","tag-third-view-mek","module-article","ctype-story","blog-western-bloggers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9610"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=9610"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=9610"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=9610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}