Review of “spying” on Trump campaign has wide reach
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has begun to fill in details on his controversial pledge to investigate whether the FBI and Justice Department engaged in improper “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016.
In a contentious hearing this week on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Democrats accused Barr of sounding like President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. But some Republicans encouraged Barr to lay out the contours of the nascent surveillance probe that he made clear is among his top priorities.
Barr told the Senate Judiciary panel that he has assembled a team to determine whether there was any improper “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016, including whether intelligence collection began earlier than previously known and how many confidential informants the FBI used. He also suggested his focus was on senior leaders at the FBI and Justice Department at the time.
“To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people,” Barr said.
His review also will examine whether a dossier that included salacious accusations against Trump was fabricated by the Russian government to dupe U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI, Barr told the Senate panel Wednesday.
“We now know that he was being falsely accused,” Barr said of Trump. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”
Mueller’s report didn’t say there were false accusations against Trump. It said the evidence of cooperation between the campaign and Russia “was not sufficient to support criminal charges.” Investigators were unable to get a complete picture of the activities of some relevant people, the special counsel found.
Although Barr’s review has only begun, it’s helping to fuel a narrative long embraced by Trump and some of his Republican supporters: that the Russia investigation was politically motivated and concocted from false allegations in order to spy on Trump’s campaign and ultimately undermine his presidency.
Barr’s review could get a boost after a report by The New York Times on Thursday that the FBI sent a trained investigator to London in 2016 to pose as a research assistant and probe Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos over possible campaign links to Russia.
Trump’s re-election campaign quickly seized on that report as evidence that the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. “As President Trump has said, it is high time to investigate the investigators,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
During the Senate hearing, Republicans enthusiastically encouraged Barr to push deeper into the origins of the Trump probe.
Sen. John Cornyn told Barr: “It appears to me that the Obama administration, Justice Department and FBI decided to place their bets on Hillary Clinton and focus their efforts” on investigating the Trump campaign.
It fell to Republican Sen. John Kennedy to point out that the FBI was also investigating Trump’s 2016 opponent during the campaign.
“There were two investigations here,” he said. “One was an investigation of Donald Trump. There was another investigation of Hillary Clinton. I’d like to know how that one started, too.”