Fired FBI Director James Comey claimed Thursday that he has no clue what Attorney General William Barr meant when he testified this week that federal agents “spied” on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“I have no idea what he’s talking about so it’s hard for me to comment,” Comey replied when asked about Barr’s remark at a Hewlett Foundation conference. “I think his career has earned him a presumption that he will be one of the rare Trump Cabinet members who will stand up for truth,” he continued, adding that “language like this makes it harder.”
Appearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Wednesday, Barr told senators that he believes that the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign, stating that the Justice Department must “explore” the matter.
“I think spying did occur,” said the attorney general. “But the question is whether it was predicated — adequately predicated, and I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated, but I need to explore that. I think it’s my obligation. Congress is usually concerned about intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies staying in their proper lane, and I want to make sure that happened. We have a lot of rules about that.”
Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak wrote this week that Barr’s remarks vindicated months of the website’s reporting on Spygate.
As conservative radio host Mark Levin and Breitbart News pointed out in March 2017, based solely on reporting by the mainstream media itself (using leaks from law enforcement and counter-intelligence sources), there was clearly an attempt by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to conduct surveillance on the Trump campaign. In the months since, new facts have confirmed that suspicion: the FBI even placed at least one informant in the Trump campaign.
When President Trump tweeted, in apparent response to Levin and Breitbart’s summaries of the known facts, that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’,” the media threw a fit, accusing him of spinning a conspiracy theory. However, the president was merely repeating what the media themselves had reported. The New York Timesled its Inauguration Day coverage on Jan. 20, 2017, for example, with a front-page story that Trump aides had been “wiretapped.”
On Tuesday, Barr first revealed in a House appropriations subcommittee that he would probe the FBI’s “conduct” during its investigation into the Trump campaign. “I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,” he told lawmakers.
He said the probe is not “endemic” to the FBI, but “I think there was a failure among a group of leaders at the upper echelons.”
“I feel I have an obligation to make sure that government power isn’t abused,” he said.