Attorney General William Barr has had enough, and he indicated to members of Congress this week that he will no longer tolerate their political games.
During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings examining the special counsel’s final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Barr told lawmakers that he has already deputized a team of Justice Department investigators to look into the shady origins of the Obama administration’s Russia probe.
“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,” said Barr, referring to senior members at the FBI and Justice Department.
How the tables have turned
The attorney general will look specifically into trained government informants that — based on the thinnest of pretenses — the Obama-era FBI paid to interact with several Trump campaign aides, plying them with questions about Russian “dirt” on the Hillary Clinton campaign. However, this wide-ranging spy operation failed to produce any promising leads, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year Russia investigation proves that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
“We now know that [Trump] was being falsely accused,” Barr told the Judiciary Committee. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”
The New York Times published an exclusive report on Thursday detailing how the FBI sent a foreign woman under the assumed alias Azra Turk to pose as a research assistant and charm Trump aide George Papadopoulos into revealing his supposed connections with Russia. She joins Cambridge University Professor Stephen Halper as the second named spy to infiltrate the Trump campaign with only weak intelligence as justification.
“I think spying did occur,” Barr said during testimony before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”
False pretenses
Preliminary evidence suggests that the early Russia investigation was not “adequately predicated.” Joseph Mifsud, a European professor with ties to the Clinton Foundation, told Papadopoulos that Moscow had “dirt” on Clinton.
The FBI became involved after the junior Trump aide repeated that allegation to another Clinton-connected source, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer.
An FBI asset, Joseph Mifsud, told me in London that: “the Russians have Hillary’s emails.” A week later, the FBI sends Clinton ally, Alexander Downer, to make contact with me and lie about our meeting to create a false pretext. Comey FBI/Fiveeyes collaborating to sabotage Trump.
— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) April 5, 2019
Barr said he is working with FBI Director Christopher Wray “to reconstruct exactly what went down.” He told lawmakers that he has “people in the department helping me review the activities over the summer of 2016.”
The attorney general will also explore the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Court warrants which the FBI used to obtain secret wiretap warrants on Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016. Senior FBI and DOJ officials relied overwhelmingly upon a completely unverified dossier that was paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic donors to have their warrant application approved.
Democrats and mainstream media sources have taken exception to the characterization of the Obama intelligence community’s Trump campaign probe as “spying.” They have minimized the legal implications of this politically-motivated spy operation by masking the FBI’s activities with innocuous language like “counterintelligence operations” and “trained informants.”
Politically-loaded language
These are just partisan semantics. While an informant passively collects information on a subject, a spy actively collects intelligence — which is precisely what Halper, Turk, and Mifsud did by feeding their unwitting sources suggestions about a Russian plot to take down Mrs. Clinton.
Rather than confront the damaging evidence facing the Obama administration, news outlets like the New York Times and Bloomberg refer to these facts as “a narrative long embraced by Trump” which is “certain to please” the president and his allies. But Obama’s partisan sting isn’t a matter of opinion any longer, and it certainly isn’t subject to political interpretation.
The FBI, the DOJ, and possibly even the CIA were weaponized in 2016 to take down the Republican presidential nominee. Finally, as Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) noted on Thursday, the American public now benefits from an attorney general who is willing “to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation” as a “first step in putting the questionable practices of the past behind us.”
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