Justice Dept. rejected investigation of Trump phone call just weeks after it began examining
Justice Department officials took less than a month to abandon an inquiry into President Trump’s communications with his Ukrainian counterpart about investigating former vice president Joe Biden — reigniting concerns among Democrats and legal observers that the law enforcement agency is serving as a shield for the commander in chief.
Just weeks after intelligence leaders asked the Justice Department and FBI to consider examining a summer phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the head of the department’s criminal division determined there was not sufficient cause to even launch an investigation, senior Justice Department officials said.
Department officials and career public integrity prosecutors reviewed a rough transcript of the call and verified its authenticity, but — because a case was not opened — took no other steps, such as conducting interviews, the officials said. They looked only at whether Trump might have violated campaign finance laws, not federal corruption statutes, even though some legal analysts said there seemed to be evidence of both.
Repeatedly in the July 25 phone call, Trump pressed Zelensky to launch an investigation into Biden and his son, and to greenlight another inquiry into the origins of the special counsel probe that once dogged Trump’s presidency, according to a rough transcript released by the administration Wednesday. He interspersed his demands with casual references to help that the U.S. government had given Ukraine, and a vague promise of how Zelensky might one day be able to meet Trump at the White House, the document shows.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-rejected-investigation-of-trump-phone-call-just-weeks-after-it-began-examining-the-matter/2019/09/25/6f7977ce-dfb5-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
Channeling John Mitchell AG Barr?
= new reply since forum marked as read
