Wednesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” network legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Attorney General Bill Barr’s comments that the Department of Justice had spied on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign was dog whistling to Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Toobin said, “Bill Barr is a classic demonstration of what’s happened to the Republican Party. He used to be an establishment figure, you know George Herbert Walker Bush administration. Now it is a Fox News party where they — and you saw this in his confirmation hearing, talking about uranium one, all these fantasies about Hillary Clinton‘s wrongdoing. This is how he talks because he is part of that party now. And that party thinks the FBI, the CIA, everybody is conspiring to get Donald Trump, and they now have their attorney general.”
Political correspondent Dana Bash said, “It is true that there was technically spying on people…So what he said is not wrong, it is just the terminology he used was a dog whistle.”
Toobin said, “Fair enough. The attorney general of the United States in a dog whistle to Sean Hannity is a big deal.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN