(Image via YouTube screenshot)
Attorney General Bill Barr gave NBC News an exclusive
interview on Tuesday after the release of the Inspector General’s (IG) report
on misconduct and lying by the FBI in its spying case against Donald Trump.
In his calm and fastidious fashion, Barr answered NBC
News reporter Pete Williams’s questions about the IG Report with all the ease
of a pat of butter in a warm frying pan.
Here are the big takeaways from Barr’s exclusive to NBC
News:
- Believes
the predicate to start the “full-blown counterintelligence investigation”
of the Trump campaign in the first place was “flimsy”
- The
FBI spied on the Trump campaign and believes that “this is the first time
in history that… the use of these counterintelligence techniques [have
been used] against a presidential campaign”
- That
“this campaign and administration has been dominated by this investigation
that it turns out to be completely baseless”
- “Inexplicable”
that investigators talked to Russians before they ever talked to Trump
campaign
Barr sometimes showed signs of exasperation and
incredulity, especially about the conduct of FBI officers involved in spying on
the Trump campaign. Take a breath because you might get lightheaded from all
this straight talk from the nation’s top cop:
"I think the big picture is this. From day one… of this
investigation on July 31st, 2016, and all the way to its end in September 2017,
there was not one bit of incriminatory evidence to come in. It was all
exculpatory … So what happens?
"The FBI ignores it and presses ahead. Withholds…
critical exculpatory information from the [FISA] Court while it gets an
electronic surveillance warrant. It withholds from the Court clear-cut evidence
that the dossier that they ultimately relied on to get the FISA warrant, was a
complete sham.
"They hid information about the lack of reliability even the
first time they went for a warrant but in January after the election, the
entire case collapsed after the principal source says 'I never told Steele
this stuff.'
"... At that point, when their entire case collapsed, what
do they do? They kept on investigating the president well into his
administration… But here to me is the damning thing. They not only didn’t tell
the court that what they were relying on was completely rubbish, they actually
started putting in things to bolster the Steele report by saying, "Well,
we talked to the sources and they appear to be truthful. But don’t inform the
court that what they’re truthful about is that the dossier is false."
And now comes the investigation by U.S. Attorney John
Durham and Barr says the Connecticut lawman has a completely different job than
did the Inspector General.
Barr named four things Durham is looking into:
- How
the investigation got started.
- “If
the narrative that Trump being involved in the [election] interference
actually preceded July and was, in fact, the precipitating trigger for the
investigation.”
- The
conduct of the investigation that was not included in the IG Report.
- The
post-election investigation that continued after the FBI case had
“collapsed.”
Williams asked if he still agreed that the Trump campaign
had been spied on:
“Oh, it was clearly spied upon. I mean, that’s what
electronic surveillance is. I think wiring people up to go in and talk to
people and make recordings of their conversations is spying. I think going
through people's emails, which they did as a result of the FISA warrant is spying.
Plus he shared a nugget about former FBI Director Comey’s
refusal to sign back up “for his security clearance [so he] couldn’t be
questioned about classified matters."
Barr said that the “irregularities, these misstatements,
these omissions” by the FBI in its investigation “leaves open the possibility
to infer bad faith.”
Watch the interview for yourself here:
