Prosecutors are investigating whether the president’s lawyer broke laws meant to prevent covert foreign influence on the government.
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the inquiry.
The investigators are examining Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to undermine the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, one of the people said. She was recalled in the spring as part of Mr. Trump’s broader campaign to pressure Ukraine into helping his political prospects.
The investigation into Mr. Giuliani is tied to the case against two of his associates who were arrested this week on campaign finance-related charges, the people familiar with the inquiry said. The associates were charged with funneling illegal contributions to a congressman whose help they sought in removing Ms. Yovanovitch.
Mr. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing, but he acknowledged that he and the associates worked with Ukrainian prosecutors to collect potentially damaging information about Ms. Yovanovitch and other targets of Mr. Trump and his allies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his younger son, Hunter Biden. Mr. Giuliani shared that material this year with American government officials and a Trump-friendly columnist in an effort to undermine the ambassador and other Trump targets.
Federal law requires American citizens to disclose to the Justice Department any contacts with the government or media in the United States at the direction or request of foreign politicians or government officials, regardless of whether they pay for the representation. Law enforcement officials have made clear in recent years that covert foreign influence is as great a threat to the country as spies trying to steal government secrets.
A criminal investigation of Mr. Giuliani raises the stakes of the Ukraine scandal for the president, whose dealings with the country are already the subject of an impeachment inquiry. It is also a stark turn for Mr. Giuliani, who now finds himself under scrutiny from the same United States attorney’s office he led in the 1980s, when he first rose to prominence as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and later ascended to two terms as mayor of New York.
It was unclear how far the investigation has progressed, and there was no indication that prosecutors in Manhattan have decided to file additional charges in the case. A spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, declined to comment.
Mr. Giuliani said that federal prosecutors had no grounds to charge him with foreign lobbying disclosure violations because he said he was acting on behalf of Mr. Trump, not the Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, when he collected the information on Ms. Yovanovitch and the others and relayed it to the American government and the news media.
“Look, you can try to contort anything into anything, but if they have any degree of objectivity or fairness, it would be kind of ridiculous to say I was doing it on Lutsenko’s behalf when I was representing the president of the United States,” Mr. Giuliani said. Mr. Lutsenko had chafed at Ms. Yovanovitch’s anticorruption efforts and wanted her recalled from Kiev.
Mr. Giuliani also said he was unaware of any investigation into him, and he defended the pressure campaign on Ukrainians, which he led, as legal and above board.
CNN and other news organizations reported that federal prosecutors were scrutinizing Mr. Giuliani’s financial dealings with his associates, but it has not been previously reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan are specifically investigating whether he violated foreign lobbying laws in his work in Ukraine.
Ms. Yovanovitch told impeachment investigators on Friday that Mr. Trump had pressed for her removal for months even though the State Department believed she had “done nothing wrong.”
Mr. Giuliani had receded from the spotlight in recent years while he built a brisk international consulting business, including work in Ukraine. But he re-emerged in the center of the political stage last year, when Mr. Trump retained him for the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference.
Russia’s sabotage also ushered in a new focus at the Justice Department on enforcing the laws regulating foreign influence that had essentially sat dormant for a half-century and under which Mr. Giuliani is now being investigated.
Mr. Giuliani said that because Democrats had questioned his business consulting for foreign clients, his contracts explicitly say he does not lobby or act as an agent of foreigners.
Through his two associates who also worked to oust the ambassador, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Mr. Giuliani connected early this year with Mr. Lutsenko, who served as Ukraine’s top prosecutor until August. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman had previously connected Mr. Giuliani to Mr. Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, late last year.
Mr. Parnas had told people that Ms. Yovanovitch was stymieing his efforts to pursue gas business in Ukraine. Mr. Parnas also told people that one of his companies had paid Mr. Giuliani hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unrelated American business venture, and Mr. Giuliani said he advised Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman on a Ukrainian dispute.
Mr. Lutsenko had sought to relay the information he had collected on Mr. Trump’s targets to American law enforcement agencies and saw Mr. Giuliani as someone who could make that happen. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Lutsenko initially spoke over the phone and then met in person in New York in January.
Mr. Lutsenko initially asked Mr. Giuliani to represent him, according to the former mayor, who said he declined because it would have posed a conflict with his work for the president. Instead, Mr. Giuliani said, he interviewed Mr. Lutsenko for hours, then had one of his employees — a “professional investigator who works for my company” — write memos detailing the Ukrainian prosecutors’ claims about Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Biden and others.
Mr. Giuliani said he provided those memos to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this year and was told that the State Department passed the memos to the F.B.I. He did not say who told him.
Mr. Giuliani said he also gave the memos to the columnist, John Solomon, who worked at the time for The Hill newspaper and published articles and videos critical of Ms. Yovanovitch, the Bidens and other Trump targets. It was unclear to what degree Mr. Giuliani’s memos served as fodder for Mr. Solomon, who independently interviewed Mr. Lutsenko and other sources.
Mr. Solomon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lobbying disclosure law contains an exemption for legal work, and Mr. Giuliani said his efforts to unearth information and push both for investigations in Ukraine and for news coverage of his findings originated with his defense of Mr. Trump in the special counsel’s investigation.
He acknowledged that his work morphed into a more general dragnet for dirt on Mr. Trump’s targets but said that it was difficult to separate those lines of inquiry from his original mission of discrediting the origins of the special counsel’s investigation.
Mr. Giuliani said Mr. Lutsenko never specifically asked him to try to force Ms. Yovanovitch’s recall, saying he concluded himself that Mr. Lutsenko probably wanted her fired because he had complained that she was stifling his investigations.
“He didn’t say to me, ‘I came here to get Yovanovitch fired.’ He came here because he said he had been trying to transmit this information to your government for the past year, and had been unable to do it,” Mr. Giuliani said of his meeting in New York with Mr. Lutsenko. “I transmitted the information to the right people.”
The president sought to distance himself earlier on Friday from Mr. Giuliani, saying he was uncertain when asked whether Mr. Giuliani still represented him. “I haven’t spoken to Rudy,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I spoke to him yesterday quickly. He is a very good attorney and he has been my attorney.”
Mr. Giuliani later said that he still represented Mr. Trump.
The recall of the ambassador and the efforts by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani to push for investigations in Ukraine have emerged as the focus of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.
The impeachment was prompted by a whistle-blower complaint about Mr. Trump pressing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in a July phone call to pursue investigations that could help Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. At the time, the Trump administration had frozen $391 million in military assistance to Ukraine for its fight against Russian-backed separatists.
The State Department’s inspector general has turned over to House impeachment investigators a packet of materials including the memos containing notes of Mr. Giuliani’s interviews with Mr. Lutsenko and Mr. Shokin.
The investigation into Mr. Giuliani is the latest to scrutinize one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers. His former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, implicated the president when he pleaded guilty last year to making hush payments during the 2016 campaign to women who claimed affairs with Mr. Trump, which he has denied.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan mentioned Mr. Trump as “Individual 1” in court papers but never formally accused him of wrongdoing.
Michael S. Schmidt and Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum from New York.
Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
Ben Protess covers the Trump administration, including its overhaul of Obama-era regulations and potential conflicts of interest arising out of the president’s personal business dealings. He previously covered white-collar crime, Wall Street lobbying and the private equity industry. @benprotess
Ken Vogel covers the confluence of money, politics and influence from Washington. He is also the author of “Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp — on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics.” @kenvogel • Facebook
William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal corruption, courts, terrorism and broader law enforcement topics. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. @WRashbaum • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Giuliani Being Investigated Over His Work in Ukraine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
