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“All relevant components of the department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the department has concluded the matter,” the department said in a statement in September 2019. Officials said at the time that the campaign finance determination did not preclude further investigatory work on any other potential issues.

Mr. Trump’s allies seized on that determination on the narrow question of campaign finance law to declare his innocence. But lawyers in the Public Integrity section had not examined any other potential violations, according to five people familiar with the section’s work.

It was not clear whether that office pursued an inquiry into Mr. Trump.

Their swelling frustration was a test for the new head of the section, Corey Amundson, who had joined from the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that September.

At the start of his tenure, Mr. Amundson told staff members that he had prewritten a resignation letter that he would submit if he felt he was asked to act unethically. He soothed tempers in the Ukraine matter in part by agreeing that the reconstructed transcript of the call issued by the White House left open questions about whether Mr. Trump had violated other statutes, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions.

He said that more investigation was warranted and notified his boss, Brian A. Benczkowski, then the head of the criminal division, about the tensions over the Ukraine call. Mr. Benczkowski agreed that further inquiry would be appropriate, the people said.

But once Congress began its impeachment inquiry, top Justice Department officials decided that an investigation of Mr. Trump had been overtaken by the events of impeachment, according to two people briefed on the matter. Then any inquiry into the call was consolidated with other Ukraine matters at the beginning of this year under the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office. Under the Trump administration, the department has often moved politically fraught work to prosecutors far from Washington. Those investigations have rarely resulted in charges.