Attorney General William Barr believes the Russia investigation that was encouraged by Democrats and the mainstream media — and shadowed President Donald Trump for the first two years of his administration — was started without any basis and was an effort to “sabotage the presidency,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
And he says investigators are closing in on the truth.
Barr, who has appointed a U.S. attorney to lead an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, said the Justice Department has evidence there was “something far more troubling” than just mistakes during the investigation that eventually morphed into special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
“I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr said in the interview with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham that aired Thursday night.
The attorney general said the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia “without any basis.”
“Even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president,” Barr said. “To sabotage the presidency, and I think that — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”
Trump and his supporters are counting on an investigation lead by John Durham to uncover any crimes. Durham is the U.S. attorney Barr selected to examine the early days of the Russia probe. Durham’s investigation is ongoing, and Barr did not provide any hint about what Durham has found so far.
Barr has been a loyal supporter of Trump since becoming attorney general, though their positive relationship showed signs of fraying earlier this year when Barr said in a television interview that Trump’s tweets about Justice Department cases made it hard for him to do his job.
Mueller concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election but found no evidence that there was a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mueller also examined about a dozen possible instances of obstruction of justice and brought no charges against the president.
The inspector general’s report identified significant problems with many applications for warrants to monitor the communications of the Trump campaign in 2016.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz told senators the FBI failed to follow its own standards again and again for accuracy, completeness, and honesty when it sought warrants from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s communications.
The report detailed 17 errors and mistruths during those wiretap applications, including failing to tell the court when questions were raised about the reliability of some of the information it had presented to receive the warrants. Those mistakes spurred a congressional debate over whether the bureau’s surveillance tools should be reined in.
But Barr believes they were more than just mistakes.
“My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness,” he said. “There is something far more troubling here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.
The FBI opened its investigation into the Russian election meddling on July 31, 2016.
By that point, Russian hackers had broken into the Clinton campaign and other Democratic email accounts and were sharing the information online.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article