Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Well you don't like that but you like Barr's misrepresentation of the Mueller report and the rest of his bullshit?

Individuals making biased statements were NOT found to have influenced the investigations. And there was bias against Clinton found among FBI Agents in the SDNY and other jurisdictions. Do you really imagine that the FBI is rife with liberals?

Spying claims

Main article: Spygate (conspiracy theory)

In April 2019, Barr stirred controversy by saying he thought "spying did occur" against the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.[145] The remark echoed unsubstantiated claims made by Trump and his supporters that the Trump campaign had been unfairly targeted or spied on by the FBI; Trump described it as an "attempted coup."[146][145][147][148][149] There is no evidence that government officials engaged in "spying" on the Trump campaign.[147]

Barr later said he was not sure what spying had occurred and he did clarify what he meant by "spying".[145] He also said he had no evidence of wrong-doing.[145][148] Democrats criticized Barr's statement as "incendiary", saying the statement was intended to please Trump and that the statement lacked credibility following Barr's misrepresentation of the Mueller report in March 2019.[145][147][148]

Barr said he thought there was not "any pejorative connotation at all" to the term spying.[150] At the time, Barr said he would not launch an investigation into the origins of the FBI probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.[147]

FBI officials denied Barr's claims about spying.[151] FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said he was unaware of any illegal surveillance, abuse of powers or "spying" by the FBI.[152] Subsequently Trump retweeted a far-right pundit who said the FBI had "no leadership" and that Wray was "protecting the same gang that tried to overthrow the president in an illegal coup".[153] Trump said Wray's statement was "ridiculous."[153] Former FBI Director James Comey rebutted Barr, saying "The FBI doesn't spy. The FBI investigates."[146]

In May 2019, Barr asserted, "Government power was used to spy on American citizens".[150] Barr did not identify the specific actions prior to the 2016 election that he considered spying.[150] After broadcasting some of Barr's remarks, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy, a Trump loyalist,[154] falsely asserted that FISA was designed "so that the United States could surveil people in other countries and it's very disturbing if they use the laws that are supposed to apply to people from other countries to spy on Americans illegally."[155] The same day, Trump said his campaign was "conclusively spied on", characterized the purported spying as "treason", and called for "long jail sentences."[156][157]

Origins of the Russia investigation

Main article: Russia investigation origins conspiracy theory

Also in May 2019, Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to oversee a DOJ probe into the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference.[153] The origins of the probe were already being investigated by the Justice Department's inspector general and by U.S. attorney John Huber, who was appointed in 2018 by Jeff Sessions.[153]

Democrats criticized the decision, with Sen. Patrick Leahy saying, "Ordering a 3rd meritless investigation at the request of Trump is beneath the office he holds."[153] Trump ordered the intelligence community to cooperate with Barr's inquiry and granted Barr unprecedented full authority to declassify any intelligence information related to the matter.[158][159][160][161][162]

In September 2019, Barr was reported to have been contacting foreign governments to ask for help in this inquiry, including personally traveling to the United Kingdom and Italy to seek information. At Barr's request Trump phoned the prime minister of Australia to request his cooperation.[163][164] Barr sought information related to a conspiracy theory that had circulated among Trump allies in conservative media asserting Joseph Mifsud was a Western intelligence operative who was allegedly directed to entrap Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos in order to establish a false predicate for the FBI to open an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. On October 2, 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump supporter and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to the leaders of Britain, Australia and Italy, asserting as fact that both Mifsud and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer had been directed to contact Papadopoulos.

Joe Hockey, the Australian ambassador to the United States, sharply rejected Graham's characterization of Downer.[165][166] A former Italian government official told The Washington Post in October 2019 that during a meeting the previous month, Italian intelligence services told Barr they had "no connections, no activities, no interference" in the matter; Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte later affirmed this.[167][168] One British official with knowledge of Barr's requests observed, "it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services."[169] The Washington Post reported on November 22, 2019 that the Justice Department inspector general had aggressively investigated the allegation that Mifsud had been directed to entrap Papadopoulos, but found it was without merit.

The Post also reported the inspector general found the opening of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation was legally and factually predicated.[170] The Post subsequently reported in December 2019 that Barr disagreed with the inspector general's conclusion that there was adequate evidence for the FBI to open its investigation.[171] The Post also reported in December 2019 that the inspector general asked Durham and several American intelligence agencies if there was evidence of a setup by American intelligence, but they replied there was none.[172]

On October 24, 2019, two sources told The New York Times that the Durham inquiry had been elevated to a criminal investigation.[173] The Times reported on November 22 that the Justice Department inspector general had made a criminal referral to Durham regarding Kevin Clinesmith, a low-level FBI attorney who had altered an email during the process of acquiring a wiretap warrant renewal on Carter Page, and that referral appeared to be at least part of the reason Durham's investigation was elevated to criminal status.[174] Barr rejected criticism by Democrats in Congress that the transitioned investigation was designed to provide support to Trump during his impeachment inquiry in the Trump-Ukraine scandal.[175][176]

In November 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded his investigation into the origins of the 2016 Russia probe, concluding that the investigation was not tainted by "political bias or improper motivation", and that the initial information gathered "was sufficient to predicate the investigation" given the "low threshold" for opening an investigation.

Barr rejected the conclusions of the report, declaring that the investigation was started "on the thinnest of suspicions that, in [his] view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken." This also contradicted FBI director Chris Wray, who interpreted Horowitz's findings as the investigation having "appropriate predication and authorization".[177][178]

In December 2019, Barr claimed in an interview with NBC News that the Russia investigation was "completely baseless" and said he believed the FBI's investigation may have been conducted in "bad faith".[7] Barr also refused to refute the debunked conspiracy theory of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election during the interview.[7][179

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr