UPDATED: ABC Corrects, Updates Report on Comments From Former Zelensky Adviser About Biden Call

UPDATE — 9/26, 2:39 pm ET: The ABC News report has since been updated with this paragraph:

Leshchenko on Thursday sought to back track his comments, telling ABC News that he did not know if officials had viewed discussing Biden as a precondition for a meeting and that he had meant it was just obvious that Trump had wanted to talk about it.

Setting record straight: @Leshchenkos confirmed to me what those of us in Kyiv already knew—he is NOT currently an advisor to Ukraine's Zelenskiy & wasn't at time of July 25 call. He said he DID NOT tell ABC insistence for leaders to discuss Biden probe was precondition for call. https://t.co/fNh5sMYj9i

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) September 26, 2019

Additionally, ABC’s original post did not identify Leshchenko as a former Zelensky advisor but a current one. The report now features this correction:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Serhiy Leshchenko as a current advisor to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Leshchenko advised Zelenskiy’s transition team following his election in April but has since been distanced by the administration. He is no longer advising Zelenskiy.

We are leaving the text of Mediaite’s original story below:

A new report on Ukraine features a former adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky saying that discussing the Bidens was understood as a condition of a call between Zelensky and President Donald Trump.

Serhiy Leshchenko, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament, told ABC News that after Zelensky’s election, they wanted to speak with the U.S. president:

But after weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence, the adviser said.

“It was clear that [President Donald] Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine’s Parliament, who now acts as an adviser to Zelenskiy. “This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood.”

Leshchenko also talked about Rudy Giuliani’s push for a Biden investigation and said he believes then-prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko “invented the investigations that Giuliani pushed as part of an effort to keep his job.”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!