BuzzFeed News has obtained a criminal referral alleging crimes connected with the July 25, 2019 phone call between outgoing President Donald J. Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. That call led to Trump’s impeachment. Obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Sept. 4, 2019 letter was signed by Michael Atkinson, inspector general for the intelligence community and sent to Stacey Moy, the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division:
The inspector general “is formally referring allegations received from an individual regarding, among other things, alleged violations of law related to a telephone call on July 25, 2019, between President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” Atkinson wrote. “This referral is a follow-up to my secure telephone call on August 27, 2019, with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray’s Chief of Staff, Paul B. Murphy, during which I provided to Mr. Murphy a summary of the Complainant’s allegations.”
An anonymous CIA whistleblower had filed a complaint on Aug. 12, 2019 with with the House and Senate Intelligence committees. It alleged Trump had used the call to condition $400 million in military aid to Ukraine on Zelensky’s investigating claims that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine’s prosecutor to drop an investigation into Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter had served. Trump also wanted Zelensky to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory relating to the DNC server hacked during the 2016 campaign.
BuzzFeed also obtained a letter Atkinson sent to White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Aug. 26, 2019 requesting all materials relating to the Ukraine call, reminding the White House that failure to preserve all documents could “result in charges of obstruction of justice.” Trump fired Atkinson last April.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow observed Tuesday evening that with Attorney General Bill Barr leaving the Department of Justice in a week, his duties for the last month of Trump’s term will fall to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the deputy attorney general with a history of protecting Trump and his friends.
Drawing on Charlie Savage’s reporting at the new York Times, Maddow read off a bill of particulars against Rosen including burying the criminal referral BuzzFeed obtained:
Rosen kept convicted former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort out of Rikers Island as he awaited trial on another charge. Over objections from career prosecutors, Rosen suggested a grand jury should indict former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew G. McCabe over alleged false statements in internal inquiries. McCabe was acting director when the agency opened an obstruction of justice investigation against Trump.
Rosen reviewed the work of prosecutors in the case against Trump ally Roger Stone.
The Times report continues:
In June, according to a person familiar with internal deliberations, Mr. Rosen quietly quarterbacked a government lawsuit that unsuccessfully asked a judge to order Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton to pull back his White House memoir, which presents a negative account of the president and had already been printed. (The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Mr. Rosen’s behind-the-scenes role.)
Rosen also angered career prosecutors by stalling the filing of criminal charges against former interior secretary Ryan Zinke over a Montana land deal. Zinke was not charged.
Rosen wrote federal prosecutors suggesting they might bring sedition charges against anti-racism protesters.
Whatever his inclinations, his time as attorney general will be brief, noted Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Duke University School of Law. He added that if Mr. Rosen were to issue any “off the wall” edicts at the Mr. Trump’s request, career department employees could try bureaucratically to slow them.
“With so little time left, what is it an attorney general can do with a stroke of his pen?” Mr. Buell asked. “A sustained effort to steer a department in a particular direction takes more than a month.”
The implication is that however brief his tenure, Rosen is likely to make the most of his last five weeks in Trump’s service.
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