A top Justice Department official in Pennsylvania has been “quietly” reviewing records and documents related to Ukraine for “several weeks.”
A source familiar with the matter told CBS News that Attorney General William Barr assigned the review to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh.
The review includes some materials provided by President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has accused former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden of corruption. The younger Biden was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was spearheading the Obama administration’s efforts to tackle corruption in the country.
The review, which also involves matters other than the Bidens, is separate from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the origins of the Russia investigation.
Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and the country’s alleged election interference, eventually leading to Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Trump was acquitted last week by the Senate.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said Sunday that Barr had created a process for Giuliani to submit information he gathered in Ukraine to the Justice Department.
Barr said a day later that the Justice Department had “an open door to anybody who wishes to provide us information that they think is relevant.” The attorney general added that any information the department received from Giuliani and others would be “carefully scrutinized by the department and its intelligence community partners so that we could assess its provenance and its credibility.”
“We have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from the Ukraine,” Barr said on Monday. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine. There are a lot of crosscurrents. And we can’t take anything we receive from the Ukraine at face value.”
