Federal investigators are looking into a professional relationship former Trump lawyer and hair dye spokesmodel Rudy Giuliani had with a Romanian businessman living in the United States who had paid him to lobby the Romanian government to overturn a fraud conviction, Politico reports.
Giuliani was retained by a firm established by former FBI director Louis Freeh to write a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis to urge Iohannis to dismiss the findings of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate, whose work Giuliani claimed was rife with false accusations and bogus convictions. Freeh had hired to work on behalf of a Romanian national living in the London, Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu. Popoviciu owns a number of Pizza Hut and KFC franchises, as well as locations of foreign hotel chains in Romania. He was suspected of fraud for getting land in north Bucharest at a below-market price, and then building a shopping mall, car dealerships and luxury offices on the site, which also houses the US embassy. Already being investigated for corrupt ties to Ukraine and for failing to register as a foreign agent in the United States, Giuliani has claimed that he “never, ever represented a foreign national” and that his business contracts state explicitly that he won’t work for foreign entities. While Popoviciu was being investigated by the Romanian government, he reportedly retained Hunter Biden, a lawyer, to represent him, but Biden dropped the relationship before Giuliani joined in 2018. Giuliani has frequently lambasted Biden for his connections to foreigners.