Attorney General William Barr said in an interview airing Friday that he doesn't think Obama-era Department of Justice officials overseeing the Russia investigation committed treason "as a legal matter," but he does have concerns about how they conducted the probe.
"Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they're doing is in the higher interest and better good," Barr told CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford Thursday, for an interview on "CBS This Morning." "They don't realize that what they're doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have."
Barr has brought in U.S. Attorney John Durham from Connecticut to lead a probe into the origins of the Russia inquiry and Trump last week allowed Barr powers to declassify counterintelligence information. The moves came after Trump's repeated calls to "investigate the investigators."
There also are investigations underway through the U.S. Attorney's office in Utah and the Department of Justice's inspector general, who are both examining whether there was bias among government officials and if it was appropriate for them to conduct surveillance of Trump's 2016 campaign.
Barr has been criticized by Democrats for saying Trump's campaign was "spied" on, but he told Crawford he does not think the word "spying" is "dirty."
"There is nothing wrong with spying," he said. "The question is always whether it is authorized by law and properly predicated, and if it is, then it is an important tool the United States has to protect the country."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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