President sought Barr backing on Ukraine call
Justice instead released statement of its support
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump wanted Attorney General William Barr to say publicly that Trump broke no laws in his dealings with Ukraine, aides said Thursday, though Barr has never taken such a step during the ongoing impeachment investigation.
Instead, the Justice Department issued a statement in late September that “there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted” related to Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump had sought the kind of news conference that Barr conducted after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. But officials said he is satisfied with the way the Justice Department has handled the matter.
“The DOJ did in fact release a statement about the call and the claim that it resulted in tension because it wasn’t a news conference is completely false,” one administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
In that statement, the department said that prosecutors had reviewed the summary of the July 25 Zelensky call and determined that no criminal investigation was warranted into possible violations of campaign finance law. The matter had been referred to the Justice Department by the U.S. Intelligence Community inspector general based on a whistleblower’s complaint.
Democrat lawmakers, however, have since criticized the department’s review as superficial, noting that it was based entirely on the written summary of the call, which even the White House indicated was incomplete. Authorities conducted no interviews to learn why a whistleblower took the extraordinary step of taking his concern to the inspector general for the nation’s intelligence agencies.
The Washington Post, which first disclosed the the president’s desire for the attorney general to support him, reported that Trump wanted Barr “to hold a news conference declaring that the commander in chief had broken no laws during a phone call in which he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political rival, though Barr ultimately declined to do so.”
Trump disputed aspects of the story in a morning tweet, saying Barr “did not decline my request to talk about Ukraine” and noting that “the Justice Department already ruled that the call was good.”
The Democrat-controlled U.S. House is conducting an impeachment investigation of Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate U.S. political opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who had business dealings in Ukraine.
Trump maintains he did nothing wrong, and that Democrats and the media are engaged in a “deranged, delusional, destructive, and hyper-partisan impeachment witch hunt.”