Trump lawyer forced to cancel trip to ask Ukraine for reelection help

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani made the stunning admission last week that he planned to travel to Ukraine to get the country to conduct investigations the Trump team believes would bolster Trump’s 2020 reelection chances.

Days later, Giuliani’s brazen admission that Trump planned to collude with a foreign government for electoral benefit has backfired, and he now has canceled the trip.

“I’m not going to go because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president, in some cases, enemies of the United States,” Giuliani said in a statement on Sunday, according to the Associated Press.

Of course, the damage has already been done.

Giuliani laid out the investigations he wanted Ukraine to conduct that the Trump team believes will help Trump and hurt his potential 2020 Democratic rivals. Whether or not Ukrainian prosecutors conduct those investigations, they now know the roadmap the Trump team wants them to follow and can choose whether to follow it or not.

It was the 2020 version of Trump asking Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

And while Giuliani claimed there was “nothing illegal” about his comments, election experts disagree.

“This is the first instance of which I am aware in which a private lawyer for the president of the United States has, in his own words, ‘meddled’ in a foreign criminal investigation of a third party in order to politically benefit the president,” Tim Meyer, an international law expert at Vanderbilt University, told the Washington Post. “Mr. Giuliani’s actions undermine the long-standing U.S. foreign policy of promoting the rule of law in Ukraine generally and in the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office specifically.”

Ultimately it appears that the Trump team has learned nothing from the nearly two-year-long investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s role in that illegal activity.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.