Attorney General Bill Barr discussed on Tuesday the findings of the Justice Department Inspector General’s report regarding the FBI’s abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on a member of then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Fox News reported Barr told his interviewer at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council forum that the initial premise for launching the investigation into the campaign was “flimsy.”
Barr also decried the “gross abuse” that was uncovered in detail by Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
Moreover, the attorney general noted that there were numerous questions still left unanswered following Horowitz’s investigative report.
“That’s why we have Durham,” Barr said in reference to U.S. Attorney John Durham, who has been conducting a concurrent and more broadly scoped probe that is criminal in nature and can look at things that were outside of the inspector general’s purview.
At one point, Barr issued a roughly two-minute-long soliloquy that provided a brief, yet adequate summation of what the FBI had done that was so corrupt.
His remarks left little doubt that something needed to be done to address what’s been exposed.
This is a very important two minutes from AG Barr that sums up the major takeaways from the IG report
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“This is the meat of the issue, and if you actually spend time to look at what happened, I think you’d be appalled,” Barr said.
He noted that the FBI never actually talked to the Trump campaign about its suspicions of alleged collusion with Russia.
He summed up the FBI’s thinking like this: “We’re going send people in, wire them up and have them talk to the individuals. That happened. That happened in August, September and October, and it all came back exculpatory.”
Much of this took place before the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant, so the bureau should have known there was no basis for its investigation prior to taking the next steps.
According to Barr, what the FBI learned was “not only exculpatory as to a relationship with the Russians but as to the specific facts. And that, a) they never did anything about that, they just pressed ahead, but b) they never informed the court.”
“They were told they didn’t have probable cause to get a warrant, and so they took the Steele dossier, which they had done nothing to verify, and they used that to get the warrant, to just collapse everything,” he continued. “They withheld from the court all the exculpatory information and they withheld from the court information about the lack of reliability of [former British spy Christopher] Steele.”
“The real interesting thing here, and to me the major takeaway, actually is after the election,” Barr said.
“Because in January they went to — Steele was dealing with one person, he only talked to one person, and that’s what we call the ‘primary sub-source,’ and it was that person who had the so-called network of sub-sources.”
The attorney general noted that when the FBI “finally got around to talking to him,” that person disavowed the contents of Steele’s dossier as information he’d never told him, “barroom talk and rumor” or his own personal theories.
“And at that point, it was clear that the dossier was a sham,” Barr said.
“So what happens? What happens at that point? They don’t tell the court and they continue to get FISA warrants based on that dossier,” he added.
“And more damning, is that they actually filed with the court a statement saying, ‘we talked to the sub-source and we found him credible and cooperative,'” Barr said.
“And they put that in to bolster — when what he was being truthful about was that the dossier was garbage.”
Barr’s remarks laid bare just how corrupt the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign was from the very start, even before the fraudulently obtained FISA warrant came into play and continuing even after the election.
It is abundantly clear that certain individuals who were intimately involved in this corrupt effort to undermine a political campaign need to be held accountable.
We can only hope that such an outcome is exactly what Barr and Durham have planned for the near future.
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