BARR SAYS THERE'S NO EVIDENCE THE CIA SPIED ON TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN

Barr: No 'sign of improper CIA activity' surrounding Trump-Russia investigation launch

 

by Daniel Chaitin and Jerry Dunleavy

 

Washington Examiner

December 18, 2020

 

Outgoing Attorney General William Barr said he is not privy to any evidence of CIA misconduct surrounding the genesis of the investigation into ties between President Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.

The attorney general told the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel that early on, he suspected the CIA was assisting with improper surveillance before the start of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation in 2016, but came to the determination that it wasn't before appointing U.S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel in October.

Barr said he did not “see any sign of improper CIA activity” or “foreign government activity before July 2016." He concluded that the CIA "stayed in its lane."

This comes just one year after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report on the FBI's inquiry. The watchdog determined that the Russia investigation had “sufficient factual predication," but Barr and Durham disagreed. 

“Our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.,” Durham said in a rare statement in December 2019. “Based on the evidence collected to date and, while our investigation is ongoing, last month, we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

What Durham found is not yet publicly known, but Barr agreed with him, saying, "The FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken."

In what has been dubbed the "Obamagate" or "Spygate" controversy, Trump and his supporters have alleged that top officials in the Obama administration sought to sabotage Trump's candidacy in 2016 and, later, his presidency. The president fueled speculation about the CIA with a tweet in March 2019. “'New evidence that the Obama era team of the FBI, DOJ & CIA were working together to Spy on (and take out) President Trump, all the way back in 2015.' A transcript of [former FBI agent] Peter Strzok’s testimony is devastating. Hopefully the Mueller Report will be covering this," he tweeted, tagging OANN and Fox & Friends.

In his Wall Street Journal interview, Barr's insistence that such an allegation about the CIA does not have merit marks yet another point on which he and Trump disagree. Amid growing speculation about whether Trump would fire Barr, the president announced this week his attorney general would be departing his role before Christmas while claiming their relationship has been a "good one."

Democrats and some national security veterans have dismissed the inquiry as a partisan attempt to smear Trump's perceived enemies and to discredit Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, which succeeded Crossfire Hurricane and did not find any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

In August, Durham's team interviewed former CIA Director John Brennan at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for eight hours, after which the former Obama administration official said he was not under criminal investigation.

"We knew what we had to do in 2016 in terms of CIA's responsibilities to try to understand what the Russians were doing and to try and take any steps to uncover that," Brennan said when asked to react to Barr during an interview on MSNBC. "And so, we knew that everything we did was appropriate."

Brennan revealed this year that he overruled two CIA officers who disagreed with him during the creation of the January 2017 assessment about his high level of confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in 2016 with the specific goal of helping elect then-candidate Trump. Barr reiterated that Durham was looking into that assessment in the new interview.

The 2017 assessment from the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI concluded with "high confidence" that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference" for Trump. Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA diverged from Brennan and FBI Director James Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate" rather than "high" confidence that Putin “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances through “discrediting” Clinton.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in April defending the 2017 assessment, finding that the assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis" and that “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified.”

But the Senate findings clashed with a 2018 report from the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, chaired then by California Republican Devin Nunes, which said they “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin's strategic objectives." Ratcliffe sent the intelligence community’s watchdog an investigative referral on that House report in October.

Durham is said to have scrutinized Brennan, along with the FBI, in relation to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier, which ended up in the assessment’s classified annex, and the Atlantic reported that Brennan “bets” that Durham will “criticize him for a decision ... to overrule two CIA case officers."

Barr said Durham's team is now mainly focused on "the conduct of Crossfire Hurricane, the small group at the FBI that was most involved in that," and “the activities of certain private actors" whom he did not name, although years of speculation have swirled around Cambridge professor and FBI informant Stefan Halper.

The Justice Department “was being used as a political weapon” by a “willful if small group of people" during the Trump-Russia investigation in an effort to “topple an administration,” Barr said. "Someone had to make sure that the power of the department stopped being abused and that there was accountability for what had happened.”

As seen in his report released in April 2019, Mueller and his special counsel team concluded that Russia interfered in 2016 in a “sweeping and systematic fashion" but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between Russia and Trump's campaign. 

In his report released months later, Horowitz criticized the Justice Department for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page, for the concealment of potentially exculpatory evidence from the FISA Court, and for the bureau's reliance upon British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited Democratic-funded dossier.