Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials helped orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudy Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Joe Biden and tilt the election in Donald Trump's favor, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The criminal investigation, which began during the final months of the Trump administration and has not been previously reported, underscores the federal government's increasingly aggressive approach toward rooting out foreign interference in American electoral politics. Much of that effort is focused on Russian intelligence, which has suspected ties to at least one of the Ukrainians now under investigation.
The investigation is unfolding separately from a long-running federal inquiry in Manhattan that is aimed at Giuliani. While the two investigations have a similar cast of characters and overlap in some ways, Giuliani is not a subject of the Brooklyn investigation, the people said.
Instead, the Brooklyn prosecutors, along with the FBI, are focused on current and former Ukrainian officials suspected of trying to influence the election by spreading unsubstantiated claims of corruption about Biden through a number of channels, including Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer at the time. It is unclear whether the Brooklyn prosecutors will ultimately charge any of the Ukrainians.
At one point in the investigation, the authorities examined a trip Giuliani took to Europe in December 2019, when he met with several Ukrainians, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing inquiry.
At least one of the current and former officials Giuliani met, a Ukrainian member of parliament named Andriy Derkach, is now a focus of the Brooklyn investigation, the people said.
The trip was the culmination of a yearlong effort by Giuliani, with support from Trump, to undermine Biden's presidential campaign. The effort proceeded primarily on two parallel tracks: collecting information from Ukraine to attack Biden's diplomatic efforts there as vice president, and pressing Ukraine to announce investigations into Biden and other Trump critics.
The effort ultimately backfired, leading to Trump's first impeachment.
Amid the impeachment proceedings, U.S. intelligence officials warned Trump that Derkach was seeking to use Giuliani to spread disinformation. Giuliani, who has said he did not receive a similar warning at the time, continued to vouch for the authenticity of information he received, even after Trump's Treasury Department imposed sanctions against Derkach for election interference, and accused him of being "an active Russian agent."
In an interview last year, Giuliani said there was nothing to dissuade him from meeting with Derkach, who was not under sanctions at the time. "I have no reason to believe he is a Russian agent," Giuliani said.
On Thursday, Giuliani's lawyer defended the search for information about Biden, disputing that he relied on misleading information. "When you investigate allegations of corruption, you talk to all sorts of people; some are credible, and some are not," the lawyer, Robert Costello, said. He added that "some day the truth will come out" about Biden's dealings in Ukraine.
Together, the Manhattan and Brooklyn investigations present a challenge for the Biden Justice Department, which has pledged to remain above the political fray even as it inherited a number of sensitive investigations linked to Ukraine and Russia.
The president's son, Hunter Biden, for example, is facing a federal criminal tax investigation that appears to be partly related to work he did in Ukraine, and a Justice Department special counsel is investigating the origins of Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign.
The investigation into Giuliani in Manhattan — which entered an aggressive new phase last month when FBI agents executed search warrants at his home and office — centers on whether he lobbied the Trump administration to remove the U.S. ambassador to Kyiv on behalf of Ukrainian officials who wanted her gone. It is a violation of federal law to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign officials without registering with the Justice Department, and Giuliani never registered.
Giuliani, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, has denied that he worked for any Ukrainians. He has cast his interactions with them as part of his effort to help Trump, and he denounced the FBI searches as a "corrupt double standard" by the Justice Department, which he said had ignored "blatant crimes" by Biden and other Democrats.
It might prove difficult to arrest and extradite Ukrainians who face charges to the United States. Still, charges would most likely prevent them from traveling to most parts of the world, where they could be held for possible extradition.
The Treasury Department has already leveled economic sanctions for election interference against some of the Ukrainians, essentially preventing them from doing business in the United States, or through American financial institutions.
An initial round of sanctions in September took aim at Derkach, who the Treasury Department said has been "an active Russian agent for over a decade." He was educated at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow, according to a Ukrainian biography.
Then, in January, the department levied sanctions against seven Ukrainians who it asserted were part of Derkach's inner circle, including Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian government official who worked closely with Giuliani and Senate Republicans to provide damaging information about Biden and other Trump critics.
A representative for Derkach did not respond to requests for comment, but in the past, he has called the Treasury Department's sanctions, issued under Trump, revenge by Biden's "deep state associates."
