Trump, Barr slam FBI chief after report on Russia probe
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr took aim at the FBI on Tuesday, escalating their attacks on the bureau a day after an independent watchdog concluded that former FBI officials had adequate reason in 2016 to open the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Barr said for a second straight day that he disagreed with the finding in a long-awaited report by the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, that the FBI lawfully opened its inquiry. And he went further, saying that Obama administration officials had spied on the president’s associates and, in the process, jeopardized civil liberties.
“The greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement and intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of an election,” Barr said in an interview with NBC News.
While Barr was careful to reserve his accusations for Obama-era FBI and intelligence officials, Trump drew no such boundaries and attacked his handpicked FBI director, Christopher Wray, who has said he accepted the inspector general’s findings and had ordered 40 corrective steps to address the report’s recommendations.
“I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!”
The fallout from the inspector general’s report was the latest example of the scrambling of traditional political alliances in the Trump era. A president and an attorney general from the Republican Party, long an ally of law enforcement, questioned the accuracy of the report and their trust in the FBI itself.
Barr also gave perhaps his most fulsome argument yet for why he believes the FBI improperly investigated members of Trump’s campaign, accusing former officials of “gross abuses” and “inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”
He said that FBI officials have explained that they opened the investigation in 2016 at a time when Russia was suspected of hacking into Democratic servers to steal emails that WikiLeaks later released. That itself helped prompt the Australian government to tell American officials that a Trump campaign aide had revealed an offer from a Russian intermediary of information that could damage the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“They opened a counterintelligence investigation on the whole campaign,” Barr said at a Wall Street Journal conference in Washington on Tuesday. “The proper response was to talk to the campaign,” he added, saying that law enforcement officials commonly give so-called defensive briefings to political campaigns to warn them about attempted intrusions by or other issues with foreign governments.