WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th February, 2020) The Department of Justice has established a special procedure to scrutinize the credibility of any information that President Donald Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani may have gathered on his investigative trips to Ukraine, Attorney General William Barr said during a press briefing.
"We have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from the Ukraine. There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of cross-currents. We can't take everything we receive from the Ukraine at face value," Barr said Monday. "For that reason, we had established an intake process in a field so that any information coming in about Ukraine could be carefully scrutinized by the Department and its intelligence community partners so that we could assess its provenance and its credibility."
Giuliani said that over the recent months he had traveled to Kiev, Budapest and Vienna to investigate United States' dealings with Ukraine - an issue at the heart of the Democratic bid to impeach Trump.
House of Representatives Democrats began conducted an impeachment inquiry against Trump for allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to probe Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in exchange for releasing congressionally approved military assistance. The Democrats' efforts to remove Trump from office were negated last week by the Republican-led Senate during the impeachment trial of the president.
Giuliani has repeatedly said he has obtained evidence of wrongdoing by Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine.
However, Barr said the procedure was applicable to all Ukraine-related information coming to the Justice Department, including "anything Mr. Giuliani might provide."
Trump has insisted he did nothing wrong and released the transcript of his telephone conversation with Zelenskyy.
Later in the day, US House Judiciary chairman Jerrod Nadler in a letter called on Barr to explain the intake process and said he had "serious concerns."
Nadler posed about a dozen questions to Barr including whether or not the attorney general has coordinated any of this with the White House.
