Barr: Why he’s probing ‘spying’ on Trump campaign
Attorney General William Barr just “keeps on delivering for President Donald Trump,” said Stephen Collinson in CNN.com. Barr first proved his loyalty by dismissing the obstruction evidence against Trump gathered by special counsel Robert Mueller and issuing a one-sided, misleading summary of Mueller’s report. But the partisan Republican’s shamelessness reached an alarming new peak last week when he seemed to confirm Trump’s paranoid fantasy of an attempted “Deep State” coup against him. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Barr declared he would be investigating government “spying” on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, when the FBI grew concerned about Trump associates’ numerous contacts and connections with Russians. Under grilling by incredulous Democrats, Barr “kind of, sort of walked back that claim,” said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. He clarified that he was talking about electronic surveillance—such as that conducted on former Trump adviser Carter Page—and said he wanted to find out whether that surveillance was “adequately predicated.” Predictably, Trump seized on Barr’s reckless allegation to proclaim that the Russia investigation was “illegal” and to accuse investigators of “treason.”
Actually, everything Barr said was “demonstrably true,” said Byron York in WashingtonExaminer.com. Not only did the FBI surveil Carter Page, they used an informant, Professor Stefan Halper, to gather intelligence on Page and fellow Trump advisers George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis. In applying for wiretapping warrants on Page, the FBI also cited the now infamous Steele dossier, assembled by a former British intelligence agent getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Democrats are outraged that Barr “had the temerity to call spying ‘spying,’” said Ben Weingarten in TheFederalist.com. But what really terrifies them is what a “full investigation of the investigators” will reveal. Barr mustn’t be deterred. We need to know how and why U.S. intelligence agencies came to spy on a presidential candidate’s campaign, so that it “never happens again.”
We already had that investigation, said Rick Wilson in TheDailyBeast.com. Twice. The Justice Department’s inspector general has been studying the Russia probe’s origins for more than a year, with no finding of wrongdoing; meanwhile, a House GOP effort to expose the “plot” against Trump ended in the travesty of the deceptive and highly partisan (Rep. Devin) Nunes Memo, which no one outside of Fox News took seriously. So why is Barr promising yet another investigation? Intimidation. He wants every federal prosecutor and intelligence official to know that if they dare again to investigate this president, they will face “persecution and prosecution.” What Trump’s defenders are effectively saying, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post, is that “there should never have been any FBI investigation at all into the Russian attack on the U.S. election.” This, despite the established fact that Russia “mounted a comprehensive effort to get Trump elected,” including hacking and releasing Democratic emails, targeting key voters on social media, and making dozens of contacts with Trump campaign officials. To imply that the FBI should have ignored all this is “utterly bonkers.”
Maybe the term “spying” was “indeed too pejorative,” said Rich Lowry in Politico.com, given that Barr doesn’t have all the facts yet. But we need to know how much the FBI and other intelligence officials were “legitimately—and understandably—freaked out by some of the Russia connections of Trump associates,” and how much they acted “out of partisan malice.” Barr should investigate, release his findings, and let “people decide for themselves.” ■
