Would the Barr DOJ actually investigate Trump's Ukraine extortion plan?

Legal experts see signs that DOJ is laying the groundwork for a potential criminal probe into whether the president and his top advisers broke federal laws by withholding a White House meeting and nearly $400 million dollars in foreign aid from Ukraine unless the country’s new leaders agreed to investigate Trump’s political rivals.

In Washington, the FBI has already contacted an attorney for the whistleblower who first revealed the scheme. In New York, federal prosecutors are expanding a probe into Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, who played a pivotal role in the Ukraine campaign. And on Capitol Hill, lawmakers busy with impeachment are collecting documents and testimony that could help fuel any DOJ probe into the president and others around him who were involved in the scheme.

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But the ghosts of 2016 linger. DOJ and FBI leaders are still weathering bipartisan scorn for their handling of dual election-year probes into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the Trump campaign’s Russia connections. Any moves to examine Trump as 2020 heats up will receive similar scrutiny — as will any choice not to examine Trump.

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“This is a dereliction of duty by Bill Barr to not treat this as a criminal matter. It’s Bill Barr protecting the president,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s behavior. “The way to handle it would have been to appoint a special counsel to investigate all these matters.”

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The confusion started in late September when a department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, issued a statement saying Trump had been cleared of any campaign finance violations that might stem from his July 25 call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

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But a senior DOJ official also said Kupec’s Sept. 25 statement shouldn’t be taken as the final statement on the matter. Instead, the person said Kupec was speaking only to the specific issues the inspector general had raised after reviewing the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s actions toward Ukraine. The comment, the official said, shouldn’t be seen as ruling out the possibility that DOJ would examine other issues tied to the Trump-Zelensky call.

  Politico

That sounds like a hedge against bad publicity to me.

Legal experts and several Democratic lawmakers say those other issues could include a conspiracy to commit bribery and extortion by conditioning an official government act — a presidential visit and the release of financial aid — on Ukraine’s opening of political investigations that Trump considered valuable. Trump’s actions also raise other potential violations of federal laws governing the solicitation of campaign contributions from a foreign national, the lawmakers and legal experts added.

But they're not in charge of the DOJ.

In recent weeks, the department has started to show an interest in some of the players central to the Ukraine plot.

In early October, federal prosecutors indicted two Giuliani business associates — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — on campaign finance charges.

Which could simply be a move to make Rudy the scapegoat.

An assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York on the case told a judge last month that DOJ’s “investigation is ongoing” into the matter. And subpoenas it has obtained since the indictments have given a sense of where the investigation is leading.

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One subpoena seeking documents went to Pete Sessions, a former Texas congressman who is widely believed to be referenced in the Parnas-Fruman indictment in connection with efforts to remove Yovanovitch. Another document request went to a firm launched by Brian Ballard, a prominent Trump fundraiser from Florida who did business with Parnas.

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Most recently, several media outlets reported that SDNY officials were also examining Giuliani’s consulting business for a bevy of potential federal crimes, including money laundering, campaign finance violations, obstruction of justice and wire fraud.

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DOJ’s Washington headquarters also has an interest in Giuliani’s case.

That disclosure came out in a roundabout way. Last month, department spokesman Peter Carr issued a statement to The New York Times confirming DOJ had been poking around on a separate case involving at least one of Giuliani’s other clients. That case included a meeting between Giuliani and the department's criminal division chief, Brian Benczkowski, over the summer. The Washington Post last week identified Giuliani’s client as the Venezuelan energy executive Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, who has been under scrutiny for possible money laundering and bribery.

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Then there’s the whistleblower.

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The FBI agent contacted one of the whistleblower’s attorneys in a way that indicated the person was not the subject or target of a probe, the person said. Yahoo! News first reported the FBI’s outreach to the whistleblower attorney.

Combined, legal experts and lawmakers say, the different DOJ and FBI moves could indicate a federal probe that’s edging closer to the president.

But questions also remain about federal agents’ objectives, given a number of recent events.

The last time the department investigated the president — special counsel Robert Mueller’s multiyear probe — it stopped short of charging Trump with any crimes, citing an internal legal opinion that says a sitting president can’t be indicted while in office. The same issues would apply to the Ukraine situation.

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“Trump has made it clear that he perceives any scrutiny to be a declaration of war,” said Barbara McQuade, a former Obama-era U.S. attorney from Michigan. “Agents who investigate Trump and his associates put their careers in jeopardy, but I hope that the FBI would be undeterred.”

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Republicans dismissed questions that the president could be facing any kind of DOJ scrutiny for the Ukraine matters that have also been at the center of the impeachment probe.

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Giuliani also has scoffed at questions about his legal jeopardy.

“Ohhhhh, wow,” the president’s personal attorney said Nov. 23 when asked on Fox News if he were concerned about getting indicted. “Do you think I’m afraid? Do you think I get afraid? I did the right thing. I represented my client in a very, very effective way. I was so effective that I discovered a pattern of corruption that the Washington press has been covering up for three or four years.”

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DOJ and the FBI after are also set to receive more scrutiny early next month, when the department’s inspector general will publish a report examining the early stages of the government’s Russia probe. The document is expected to criticize some bureau leaders and low-level FBI officials who worked on the Russia probe, even though it is also expected to reaffirm that officials did not improperly spy on the Trump campaign, as the president has claimed, and that political bias did not taint the investigation.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.