The Russia investigation of US President Donald Trump was started without any basis and amounted to an effort to “sabotage the presidency,” US Attorney-General William Barr told Fox News Channel in an interview that aired on Thursday.
Barr, who has appointed attorney John Durham to scrutinize the origins of the Russia probe, said that the US Department of Justice has evidence that there was “something far more troubling” than just mistakes during the investigation that was eventually taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.
“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 Laura Ingraham.
Photo: Reuters
The FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia “without any basis,” Barr said.
“Even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage the presidency,” he said.
Mueller concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election, but his investigation did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The inspector general’s report identified significant problems with applications for warrants to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016 and 2017.
Department of Justice Inspector-General Michael Horowitz has said that the FBI failed to follow its own standards for accuracy and completeness in wiretap applications provided to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The report detailed 17 errors and omissions in the application process, 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 prompted internal changes within the FBI and spurred a congressional debate over whether the bureau’s surveillance tools should be reined in.
Barr said he believes that 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.”
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