Attorney General Bill Barr confirmed the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t stray beyond its international spy brief in 2016.
Barr, who is leaving the Justice Department before Christmas, told the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel this week 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 in recent weeks came to the realization that there is no “sign of improper CIA activity” or “foreign government activity before July 2016.”
The CIA “stayed in its lane,” Barr concluded.
Former CIA Director John Brennan responded quickly by chastising not only the Justice Department’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation but also Barr himself.
“It really is courageous of Bill Barr to say this after he has already announced that he is going to be departing office,” Brennan said with a sarcastic tone after CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer said Barr “effectively, for all practical purposes, clears you of any wrongdoing” after years of accusations of wrongdoing by Trump and his allies.
“If there was no basis for this, why was I interviewed by Mr. Durham for eight hours?” Brennan said. “Bill Barr used to complain about he didn’t see the predication for the FBI investigation into Trump engagements with the Russians. What was the predication of this Durham investigation? Was it just a trolling exercise? I think that’s what it was. And they looked at a lot of documents, they talked to a lot of people. Again, they interviewed me. And clearly, they couldn’t find anything that had any type of wrongdoing associated with it.”
John Durham has a narrow focus on the FBI’s conduct of Crossfire Hurricane.
To date only one person, an FBI lawyer, has been charged, despite Trump’s public push for action before the election.
Democrats have accused Barr of acting like Trump’s personal lawyer, and he defended a range of his decisions.
On Monday, Trump announced that Barr was resigning, and the ouster followed public and private fuming by Trump about Barr.
The initial 2017 time the FBI interviewed Flynn in the Russia probe had ‘no legitimate investigative basis,’ said Barr.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents during the White House talk.
On Thursday, he called for Trump to impose martial law and rerun elections in states he lost – weeks after Trump gave him a presidential pardon.
The person Flynn lied about communicating with was then Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
The topic was sanctions the Obama administration imposed for election hacking. U.S. officials think Russia is behind a massive hack only discovered this week involving the Pentagon and even U.S. nuclear programs.
Barr defended his decision to overrule career prosecutors – some of whom quit – over prosecuting Trump associate Roger Stone.
He said he didn’t ‘go looking’ to get involved in the case, which Trump tweeted about repeatedly.
But he bristled that special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors ‘wanted a penalty for him that was unprecedented and outlandish.’
‘I wasn’t going to have the department seek such a harsh penalty,’ he said.
After the switch, Stone got a much lighter sentence – and Trump ended up commuting it.
He also defended his decision not to publicly reveal a probe into Hunter Biden.
Revelations that he had done so preceded coincided with his ouster.