Professor Karen Greenberg was asked by Politifact to provide comment on Rudy Giuliani’s involvement with Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden.
That same day, ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Pompeo what he knew about reports that Trump pressed Ukraine’s president to work with Giuliani to investigate Biden’s son.
Pompeo said he hadn’t seen the related whistleblower complaint, but later added that if Biden had “behaved inappropriately,” then “we need to get to the bottom of that.”
Soliciting help or anything of value from foreign officials in an election is unusual and could be illegal, said Yoshiko Herrera, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s also uncommon for a president’s personal attorney to communicate with foreign officials on matters that could influence White House policy, she said.
“It is going outside of established communication channels which are set up to be both secure and subject to certain protocols for later accessibility of information,” Herrera said.
It also matters who helped Giuliani along the way, said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law.
“If it’s using State Department cover or using Department of Justice cover or using whatever cover it is to actually do things that are not the purview of the government but the purview of the personal fortune, political or financial, of the president, then we’re really talking about something that is of serious concern,” she said.