Nobody, not even special counsel Robert Mueller, has "really looked" at the activities of senior officials in the nation's intelligence community during President Donald Trump's campaign, Attorney General William Barr said in an interview airing Friday, and he has more questions now than he did when he started looking into the matter.
"The thing that is interesting about this is that this was handled in a very senior level of these departments," Barr told Fox News' Bill Hemmer, who interviewed the attorney general from El Salvador, where he is touring prisons and other sites this week. "It wasn't handled in the ordinary way that investigations or counterintelligence activities are conducted."
However, most of the people involved are no longer with the FBI, the CIA, or other agencies involved, Barr told Hemmer.
There is a "misconception" that there is a lot known about what had happened, Barr continued, but Mueller was looking at whether the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia, not at the government's activities or the counterintelligence program.
"We have a number of investigations underway that touch upon it, the main one being in the office of the Inspector General, that's looking at the FISA warrants, but as far as I'm aware, no one has really looked across the whole waterfront," he said.
Barr would not speculate when the spying on the Trump campaign started, or when Mueller determined that there was no collusion with Russia, but he did say that he was "surprised" that Mueller did not have a recommendation about whether obstruction charges should be filed against President Donald Trump.
"I think people have to find out what the government was doing during that period," said Barr. "If we're worried about foreign influence for the very same reason we should be worried about whether government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale. I'm not saying that happened, but I'm saying that we have to look at that."
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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