The report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) on alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the Obama administration hasn’t been released yet — but that hasn’t stopped Democrats from speculating (read: assuming) that it will clear the FBI of any charges of “spying” that were alleged by Attorney General Bill Barr.
Those assumptions have prompted many on the left to shift their sights toward Barr himself — and now, some are even saying he should be investigated and possibly impeached for lying to Congress, Law & Crime reports.
Lying to Congress?
According to MSNBC legal analyst and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, the IG’s FISA report will expose Barr for lying when he said the FBI “spied” on Trump’s 2016 campaign team.
“I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Barr told Congress in April. “I think spying did occur.”
For her part, Vance alleged that Barr “famously went in front of Congress and talked about spying, which is not what the Justice Department does.”
She went on: “The Justice Department does court-ordered supervision or court-ordered evidence collection. The notion that the attorney general would call it ‘spying’ was shocking to many of us then, and the inspector general report confirms that it was indeed untrue.”
Jumping the gun
Of course, the IG report hasn’t been released yet, but that didn’t stop Law & Crime from citing The New York Times in reporting that the IG “‘found no evidence’ to support the idea that FBI agents engaged in material abuses” of the FISA courts. And Vance followed suit.
“The important takeaway is that everything that President [Donald] Trump has been saying for the last couple of years about the ‘Deep State’ and the effort by the Obama Justice Department to attack his campaign, that’s all been made up,” Vance said, according to Newsweek. “None of it was true.”
She added: “But it was fomented and it was really put into progress, as much as by the president, by his attorney general, Bill Barr.”
Let’s wait on the report, shall we?
Vance and others on the left may have set their sights on Barr, but the report still isn’t even out yet — and to be frank, Republicans are just as excited about it as Dems. The GOP has long alleged that Trump’s campaign was illegally surveilled, and now, the proof may be about to come out.
We’ll all know the real story come Dec. 9, when the inspector general’s report is finally released.
Until then, we’ll just have to ignore the uninformed opinions and frantic narrative-spinning of those on the left who stand to lose if the report doesn’t come out in their favor.
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