Attorney General William Barr reportedly told prosecutors and colleagues to prevent word of investigations into Hunter Biden from becoming public in the weeks before the November presidential election.
According to anonymous sources reportedly familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said Barr “took more steps than previously reported” to prevent the investigations from becoming public, despite alleged pressure from President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders to announce a probe into Hunter Biden’s finances.
Joe Biden defeated Trump in the Nov. 3 election, and the nation’s Electoral College is meeting Monday to officially vote in the 2020 presidential contest.
The Associated Press is quoting anonymous sources who said a subpoena seeking documents from Hunter Biden is asking for information related to more than two dozen entities, including Ukraine gas company Burisma. The breadth of the subpoena underscores the wide-angle lens prosecutors are taking as they examine the younger Biden’s finances and international business ventures.
Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma in particular have long dogged the policy work and political aspirations of his father. It’s unclear whether Hunter Biden’s work at the Ukrainian company is a central part of the federal investigation or whether prosecutors are simply seeking information about all his sources of income in recent years.
Hunter Biden confirmed last week his taxes are under federal investigation. The revelation comes at a delicate time for the president-elect, who is building out his Cabinet and will soon decide on his nominee to run the Justice Department, the same department overseeing the investigation into his son.
In addition to the Burisma-related request, the subpoena issued last week also seeks information on Hunter Biden’s Chinese business dealings and other financial transactions.
The probe was launched in 2018, the year before his father announced his candidacy for president. At one point in the investigation, federal prosecutors were also examining potential money laundering offenses, two people familiar with the matter told the AP.
The younger Biden joined the board of Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy with Ukraine. Trump and his allies have long argued Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine influenced the Obama administration’s policies toward the Eastern European nation.
Senate Republicans said in a report earlier this year that the appointment may have posed a conflict of interest but did not provide evidence that any policies were directly affected by Hunter Biden’s work.
The president-elect is not believed to be a focus of the investigation. He has not weighed in on the merits of the investigation, saying only to reporters on Friday that he was “proud of my son.”
For months, the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh has also been collecting information from Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and others as part of the Justice Department’s process to receive and analyze information related to Ukraine, including documents Giuliani wanted to present to prosecutors that he had been gathering in Ukraine about Joe and Hunter Biden.
In announcing that process in February, Barr cautioned the department had to be careful about any information coming from Ukraine, saying: “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of cross currents. And we can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value.”
Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, was a main character when the House voted to impeach Trump. The impeachment inquiry centered on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine’s president and whether he abused his office by seeking the investigation into the Bidens. Giuliani pressured officials to do the investigations and has been pushing unsubstantiated corruption allegations against the Bidens.
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