Barr Doubts Intelligence Accounts of Trump-Russia Probe’s Origin
Barr Doubts Intelligence Accounts of Trump-Russia Probe’s Origin
(Bloomberg) -- Attorney General William Barr said he’s not satisfied so far with official accounts justifying the counterintelligence investigation into whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was involved in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“These counterintelligence activities that were directed at the Trump campaign, were not done in the normal course and not through the normal procedures as a far as I can tell,” Barr told “CBS This Morning” in an interview broadcast Friday.
Barr, in his most detailed explanation yet of the review he ordered into the origins of the investigation that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, said that “some of the facts that I’ve learned don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened.”
The attorney general has been praised by Trump -- and condemned by Democrats -- for opening his own inquiry into the contention by the president and Republican lawmakers that the Russia inquiry was a “witch hunt” tainted in its early stages by anti-Trump bias by some officials in the Justice Department and FBI.
‘Conspiracy Theory’
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Friday in a letter to intelligence agency chiefs that his panel will conduct “rigorous, ongoing oversight” of requests made to the FBI, CIA and other elements of the intelligence community as part of Barr’s inquiry into what the California Democrat called an effort “to further a conspiracy theory.”
Schiff wrote that Trump gave Barr “unprecedented” authority to declassify intelligence, an approach he said “threatens national security by subverting longstanding rules and practices that obligate you and other heads of IC agencies to safeguard sources and methods and prevent the politicization of intelligence and law enforcement.” He asked the agency officials to tell his committee what requests they’re receiving and whether there are potential disclosures that would harm national security.
Barr said in the interview that he doesn’t think that some officials who oversaw the Russian investigation during the Obama administration committed treason -- as Trump has alleged without substantiation -- though he said he does have concerns about the way the investigation was handled.
“When you’re dealing with official government contact, intent is frequently a murky issue,” Barr said. “I’m not suggesting that people did what they did necessarily because of conscious, nefarious motives. Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have.”
Barr has been accused of spinning the results of Mueller’s report to favor Trump weeks before making it public or giving it to Congress. Mueller, in his first public statement since the 448-page report was released last month, denied that his investigation exonerated Trump of any wrongdoing.
“If we had had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so,” Mueller said on Wednesday.
Barr has been on the defensive since Mueller’s criticisms of his summation of the report were made public. The interview was one of several recent appearances Barr has made about the topic.
“From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net;Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman, Larry Liebert
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