Analysis: William Barr’s highly questionable use of Trump’s 'spying' talking point
By Aaron Blake Aaron Blake Senior political reporter, writing for The Fix Email Bio Follow April 10 at 12:00 PM From almost the moment he was nominated as President Trump’s attorney general, the question has been whether William P. Barr would do Trump’s bidding. He was assuming an important post in which Trump had grown frustrated with his predecessor’s unwillingness to do so, after all, and Barr’s own commentary on issues that personally affected Trump seemed to align with the president’s.
“The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he said. “I’m not suggesting it was not adequately predicated, but I need to explore that.” There are a few things we know about that critics of the FBI’s activities have characterized as spying. One is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But that came after he had left the campaign, so it wasn’t technically spying on a campaign official. The FBI had also been interested in Page for years — long before he was on the Trump campaign.
Unlike the Page FISA warrant, this came even as these advisers were serving on the campaign. But as the Times noted, the idea that it constituted “spying on a political campaign,” as Barr put it, is highly contentious. One reason is the nefarious connotations of “spying,” and another is the idea that it was specifically “directed at the Trump campaign,” as Barr said, rather than at potential Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At another point in the same interview, Clapper seemed to momentarily borrow the term Trump was using. “They were spying on — a term I don’t particularly like — but on what the Russians were doing,” Clapper said. Trump has misleadingly used that quote to argue that Clapper was confirming that spying did exist.
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