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In response, Mr. Brady called Mr. Costello and offered to meet. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Costello sent reams of documents to Pittsburgh, then traveled there on Jan. 29. They were picked up by F.B.I. agents and stopped for breakfast before meeting for nearly four hours at the local F.B.I. office with Mr. Brady and his top deputies on the inquiry, Stephen Kaufman and Ira Karoll, the person said.

Mr. Costello had several ensuing conversations with Mr. Brady’s office, including as recently as this summer, about the Bidens. Mr. Costello and Mr. Giuliani also recommended a handful of potential witnesses in the United States and Ukraine for the F.B.I. to interview, but Mr. Costello said the F.B.I. never followed through.

“The choice of which U.S. attorney’s office investigates a matter is left to the Justice Department, and not the F.B.I.,” Mr. Costello said, adding that no one from the F.B.I. or Mr. Brady’s office raised any concerns with them about their material on the Bidens. “It is inappropriate for the F.B.I. to question Justice’s decision.”

At a news conference about a week after the meeting, Mr. Barr announced that he had created an intake process for information about Ukraine to “assess its provenance and its credibility.”

He did not mention Pittsburgh, nor the meeting. Mr. Barr cautioned that investigators had to be careful about any information coming from Ukraine, including from Mr. Giuliani. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of crosscurrents,” Mr. Barr warned. “And we can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value.”

It was not clear why Mr. Barr assigned the task to Mr. Brady, but he has farmed out other politically sensitive investigations to trusted U.S. attorneys outside Washington.