(Bloomberg) -- 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 him 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 on 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.
#1
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
The intelligence community was not 'duped'. They exploited the dossier for political purposes.
#6
In a contentious hearing this week on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Democrats accused Barr of sounding like President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
It's not Barr is Trump's personal lawyer; it's just that Dems have gotten so outrageously corrupt that everyone is beginning to notice and getting fed up with it.
[Really Hot Air] I’m imagining him delivering his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention next year. "And now I’d like to say a few words to black Americans, without whom this moment wouldn’t have been possible. Homies..."
Are any progressives pretending to be outraged about this? Republicans might be outraged knowing how it would have been received had, say, George Bush or Mitt Romney used the same phrasing. (Never mind Trump.) The problem for anti-Biden lefties in wanting to feign upset about it, though, is the same problem they ran into last night with the 2015 clip of Biden praising Dick Cheney: It’s old. It’s been out there for years. The clip above is new, sure, but he’s been telling this same story with the same terminology since he was in office. Here he is as vice president in 2014 telling the Chamber of Commerce about residents of "the hood" in Detroit. He told the same story to the Brookings Institution last year and was dinged for it by the RNC, among others.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.