Trump's AG actually investigating whether 'deep state' spied on Trump

Attorney General Bill Barr wasn’t wearing a tinfoil hat at his Wednesday testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, but he might as well have been.

At the hearing, Barr made absolutely insane comments in which he accused the “upper echelon” of the U.S. intelligence community of “spying” on Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“I think spying did occur,” Barr said in response to a question from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who was questioning why Barr would launch yet another unnecessary investigation into the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties.

Let’s make something perfectly clear: There was no spying on the Trump campaign.

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant was issued against Trump campaign aide Carter Page after Page already left the Trump campaign. And the FBI was surveilling Page because they had evidence to believe he was a Russian agent.

And the Page FISA warrant wasn’t even the reason why the Trump-Russia investigation was launched in the first place.

It was instead spurred by drunken comments George Papadopoulos, yet another Trump campaign official, made to a diplomat of an ally country.

So there’s absolutely no evidence that inappropriate “spying” led to the Trump-Russia investigation.

This has not been corroborated publicly in any way. The FISA on Carter Page came after he left the campaign and evidence of contact between Page/Papadopoulos and a confidential human source is a very different thing than "spying" on a campaign.

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 10, 2019

Yet that didn’t stop Barr from perpetuating this baseless notion that the Trump-Russia investigation was some kind of deep-state plot that Trump on Wednesday called “an attempted coup” in a batshit media availability on the White House lawn.

Republicans such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Trump sycophants on Fox News have long pushed the ridiculous “spy” theory that Barr is now giving credence with a Justice Department probe.

Barr’s decision to investigate this ridiculous conspiracy is yet another instance of him trying to run defense for Trump.

He’s already been sitting on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report for weeks, and is unilaterally deciding to redact portions of the report before Congress can even see it.

Barr is proving himself to be the Trump lapdog Democrats feared he would be.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.