Barr says CIA ‘stayed in its lane’ in examining Russian interference
WASHINGTON >> The Justice Department’s examination of the investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has cleared the CIA of suspicions that it targeted President Donald Trump and his associates, Attorney General William Barr said in an interview published Friday.
“The CIA stayed in its lane,” and he did not “see any sign of improper CIA activity,” Barr told conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel. His comments made more explicit his disclosure this month that the investigation by John Durham, a prosecutor whom Barr appointed as a special counsel in the case, had narrowed to focus on the FBI.
Barr stopped short of fully absolving the CIA; he confirmed that Durh am was reviewing the early 2017 assessment by the agency and other parts of the intelligence community that concluded that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had favored Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Barr has drawn criticism for his previous uses of the term “spying” to describe investigative activities, though he has applied it more generally to the FBI’s Russia investigation than to the CIA’s scrutiny of the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference campaign. Barr reserved harsh judgment for the FBI’s investigation, calling parts of it “outrageous.”
Barr, who will depart office next week, sought to burnish his legacy in the interview. He has been widely criticized for his interventions in cases involving Trump’s associates, his portrayal of the Mueller report that a judge called “distorted” and “misleading,” and other efforts to advance the president’s political agenda, but he insisted he was an impartial arbiter of justice who stopped the Justice Department from being used as a “political weapon.”
Ba r r sa id he ha d planned to stay on as attorney general if Trump had won reelection, but his relationship with the mercurial president had frayed at times, making his continued role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer tenuous.
Barr did not assert that election fraud had played a role in Trump’s election loss.