Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is making good on his promise to fight against corruption. But his efforts could lead to trouble for President Donald Trump after a prosecutor who aided Rudy Giuliani’s search for damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden was fired in a sweeping anti-corruption purge.
According to the Washington Post, Kostiantyn Kulyk, one of Giuliani’s key contacts in Ukraine, was given a dismissal notice last week after failing to show up for an exam that was part of a review process for prosecutors held over from the previous administration.
The disgraced prosecutor appeared in a report by The Hill’s John Solomon, to whom Giuliani fed dubious claims to fuel the debunked narrative that Biden had a prosecutor terminated while he was investigating a Ukrainian firm that employed his son.
Kulyk also helped fuel what former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch described as a Giuliani-led smear campaign to get her fired. The prosecutor told Solomon that Yovanovitch blocked him and other officials from getting a visa to travel to the U.S. to share information about his findings.
Last month, during an interview with The Blaze’s Glenn Beck, Giuliani bragged that he used Solomon to push the claims.
U.S. Senior State Department official George Kent also testified last month that Solomon’s reporting, “if not entirely made up in full cloth,” was filled with “non-truths and non-sequiturs.”
Kulyk was just one Ukrainian prosecutor with whom Giuliani dealt. Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, who was fired from his position earlier this year and is now under a criminal investigation for corruption, fed Giuliani and Solomon false information about Biden and Yovanovitch. He has since retracted his claims and acknowledged that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden.
Documents obtained by media outlets last week showed that Giuliani was negotiating a contract with Lutsenko, which would have paid Giuliani upwards of $500,000 to represent him even as he was purportedly representing President Donald Trump in his search for damaging information on his opponents.
The draft contracts included proposed payments to Trump-allied attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. A separate draft agreement called for Toensing to be paid $25,000 a month to represent former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Shokin is the prosecutor at the heart of Trump’s conspiracy theory about Biden. During the Obama years, Biden pressed for Ukraine to fire Shokin, because multiple western countries complained that he was not pursuing corruption investigations.
Trump and his allies, however, have claimed that Biden pushed for Shokin’s firing while the prosecutor was investigating Burisma, a company whose board included his son. But that investigation, which was not connected to Biden, had already been shut down at the time of Shokin’s firing.
