“Therefore,” he continued, “Mr. Giuliani will not comment one way or the other.”
Mr. Betancourt has not been charged with any crime, but The Miami Herald reported this month that he was among the unnamed Venezuelans identified as conspirators in a criminal complaint filed in Miami detailing an embezzlement and bribery scheme that siphoned $1.2 billion from the country’s government-owned oil company.
Jon Sale, Mr. Betancourt’s Miami-based lawyer, said his client denied any wrongdoing.
Mr. Sale declined to comment further on the case, or on Mr. Giuliani’s involvement in it.
Mr. Sale and another lawyer who has represented Mr. Betancourt, Frank H. Wohl, worked with Mr. Giuliani as federal prosecutors in Manhattan in the 1970s.
Mr. Wohl, Mr. Sale and Mr. Giuliani were among the lawyers who represented Mr. Betancourt in the Sept. 3 meeting in Washington with lawyers from the Justice Department, including Brian A. Benczkowski, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Criminal Division.
After that meeting, which was first reported by The Times, a Justice Department spokesman issued a statement saying that Mr. Benczkowski and the other department lawyers would not have met with Mr. Giuliani had they known that Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were under investigation by prosecutors in Manhattan.
Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were arrested last month on campaign finance charges, in a case that is linked to the investigation of Mr. Giuliani.
Mr. Giuliani has complained that the scrutiny of him has hurt his business.
“The damage that it does to your practice is pretty damn bad,” he said in an interview this month, “because people don’t want to be your client. They think they’re going to get investigated for every stupid little thing that somebody can find to ask a question about. People come to me because they like confidentiality.”
Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and Ben Protess from New York.