Based on reconstructed transcript, DOJ decided Trump's conduct during Ukraine call did not rise to a criminal level

About a month after the Justice Department received a whistleblower complaint about President Trump's communications with a foreign leader, the department found that Trump's conduct did not rise to a criminal level.

During his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump told Zelensky he needed to work with Attorney General William Barr to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The DOJ's criminal division reviewed the complaint, with Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen overseeing it. Last week, they determined that there were no legal grounds to launch a criminal investigation into Trump's actions, saying the whistleblower did not have firsthand knowledge of the phone call and may have been politically motivated, The New York Times reports. 


The complaint was deemed credible by the intelligence community's inspector general, and marked as being of "urgent concern." Senior officials said the criminal division came to its conclusion solely because of the reconstructed transcript of the call, and no witnesses or participants were interviewed. After the complaint was filed in August, two top intelligence officials asked a Justice Department lawyer if the complaint should be passed on to Congress, and they were told no, the DOJ would handle the matter, the Times reports.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"The idea that the Department of Justice would have intervened to prevent it from getting to Congress throws the leadership of the department into further ill repute," House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Wednesday. A DOJ official told the Times that Barr didn't know about the call until late last month.