DOJ to take Giuliani info; Barr voices caution
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr said Monday that the Justice Department would consider information from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, about Ukraine. That could include assertions about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The Justice Department “has the obligation to have an open door to anybody who wishes to provide us information that they think is relevant,” Barr said at an unrelated news conference.
He added that no information coming out of Ukraine could be taken “at face value” given the amount of politically driven disinformation that could emerge from the country.
Any information from Giuliani would be considered highly controversial, as he has long promoted purported efforts by Ukrainians to undercut Trump’s 2016 presidential bid and urged further scrutiny of the overlap between Biden’s anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine as vice president and his son’s seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company widely accused of corruption. Any investigations into those matters could benefit the president by potentially undermining his political rivals.
Giuliani is also under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for possibly violating foreign lobbying laws in his work related to Ukraine.
Barr’s remarks came a day after Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the attorney general had informed him that the Justice Department was “receiving information coming out” of Ukraine that Giuliani and his associates were uncovering.
“As I did say to Sen. Graham, we have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from the Ukraine,” Barr said Monday. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of crosscurrents. And we can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value.”
The Justice Department can gather information without opening an investigation. Barr said in a memo last week the he would personally have to approve any inquiry into the 2020 presidential candidates.
Barr also told Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that a process was now in place that would allow the Justice Department to analyze whether information shared by Giuliani was credible.
Giuliani would not comment Monday on whether he had shared any information with the Justice Department, but he rejected questions about the credibility of what he had collected. “My information checks out 10 ways to Sunday,” he wrote in a text message, asserting that he had obtained four or five “unquestionably true documents” relating to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine.
In the past, the Justice Department has distanced itself from Giuliani. In September, a spokeswoman said that Barr had “not discussed anything relating to Ukraine” with Giuliani.
And a spokesman has said that Brian Benczkowski, the assistant attorney general for the department’s criminal division, would not have included Giuliani in an August meeting about a bribery case had he known that federal prosecutors in New York were investigating two of Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
Parnas and Fruman were charged weeks after the meeting with violating campaign finance laws to try to unlawfully influence politicians, including former Rep. Pete Sessions, RTexas.
Giuliani had worked with the two men last year to collect information about — and advance investigations into — targets of Trump, including Biden, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
Democrats on Monday raised questions about the arrangement, suggesting that it posed a potential conflict of interest for Barr given the department’s ongoing investigation of Giuliani’s associates.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. and the House Judiciary Committee chairman, called it “a significant departure from those traditional channels.” In a letter to the attorney general, he demanded to know how the “intake process” would work and who had vetted it.