Rudy Giuliani is implicating the State Department in Trump’s Ukraine aid scandal – even though Giuliani has previously said he acted on his own.

Last night, on Fox News, Trump’s unofficial chief of staff and Bedtime BFF Sean Hannity got Rudy Giuliani to verify Hannity’s previous announcement that Giuliani had been sent to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son by the State Department.

HANNITY: Did our State Department ask you to go on a mission for them?

GIULIANI: They did. I was called by the State --

HANNITY: And you're a good citizen and you went?

GIULIANI: The State Department called me and said, would I take a call from Mr. Yermak, who's number two or three to the president-elect, now the president.

I was put together with Mr. Yermak. I talked to him, he gave me enormously important facts. I conveyed them all to the State Department unlike the media lies, fake news; I wasn't operating on my own. I was operating at the request of the State Department.

HANNITY: They asked you to be a good citizen and do a mission for them.

By the way, the Biden corruption “story” has been completely debunked yet Fox News continues to allow its prime time host to pretend, along with Trump attorney Giuliani, that it hasn’t been.

As MSNBC’s Steve Benen noted, it’s hard to know whether to believe Giuliani or whether he will change his story given that in the past week he said, “I did what I did on my own, and then I told [Trump] about it afterwards,” as well as, “I don’t do anything that involves my client without speaking with my client.” But as Benen also pointed out, if it’s true the State Department “was directly involved in dispatching the president’s private lawyer to Ukraine, as part of a political scheme intended to help Trump’s re-election campaign, it will make the already damaging story quite a bit worse.”

It might also explain why Pompeo acted like he was hiding something when asked about Ukraine on Fox News Sunday.

It’s not clear to me why Giuliani and Hannity are doing this. Do they think it might help Giuliani avoid criminal prosecution?

What did Sean Hannity know about Ukraine and when did he know it?

Giuliani also raised a question about Hannity’s involvement in this Trump mess the two want you to think is really about Biden.

Although it was revealed in May that Giuliani planned to visit Ukraine to get oppo information to help Trump’s re-election, Giuliani said he discussed his investigation of Biden with Hannity months earlier:

GIULIANI: And I have to tell you, Sean, I knew this back in November. Somebody came to me and told me this entire fact pattern back in November. I think I told you in January.

HANNITY: You told me.

GIULIANI I told you that Biden was involved in very, very horrible corruption, shocking to me.

Giuliani did not say he told Hannity anything about talking to Ukraine but neither of them said he hadn’t either. In any event, given Hannity's closeness to Trump, his willingness to say anything on Trump's behalf, it's hard to believe Hannity knew nothing about what was going on until the you-know-what hit the fan.

Watch the plot thicken below, from the September 23, 2019 Hannity.