During a portion of an interview with NBC’s Pete Williams that aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Attorney General William Barr said the FBI ignored exculpatory evidence when obtaining FISA warrants in the investigation of any possible Trump campaign ties with Russia.
Barr said, “From day one — remember, they said, okay, we’re not going to talk to the campaign. We’re going to put people in there, rile them up and have conversations with people involved in the campaign because that way, we’ll get the truth. From the very first day of this investigation, which is July 31st, 2016, all the way to its end, September 2017, there was not one incriminatory bit of evidence to come in. It was all exculpatory. The people with the tapings denied it with Russia, denied the specific facts that the FBI was relying on. So what happens? The FBI ignores it, presses ahead, withholds that information from the court, withholds critical exculpatory information from the court while it gets an electronic surveillance warrant. It also withholds from the court clear cut evidence that the dossier that they ultimately relied on to get the FISA warrant was a complete sham.”
He continued, “They hid information about the lack of the liability, even when they went the first time for the warrant. But in January, after the election, the entire case collapsed when the principal source says I never told this. I never told Steele this stuff. And this was also speculation. And I have zero information to support this stuff. At that point, when their entire case collapsed, what do they do? They kept on investigating the president well into his administration after the case collapsed. But here to me is the damning thing: They not only didn’t tell the court that what they had been relying on was completely, you know, rubbish, they actually started putting in things to bolster this Steele report by saying we talked to the sources and they appeared to be truthful. But they don’t inform the court what they’re truthful about is that the dossier is false. So that’s hard to explain. And the core statement, in my opinion by the IG, is that these irregularities, these misstatements, these omissions were not satisfactorily explained and that leaves open the possibility to infer bad faith.”
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