Bill Barr, former Attorney General, has condemned the FBI following the release of Special Counsel John Durham's report. The investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign, initiated by the agency without any corroborating evidence, was the subject of his criticism.
"From the FBI's standpoint, I believe the true story here is what an awful this so-called inquiry was. Barr stated this week on Fox News that if it wasn't a witch hunt, it was a darn decent approximation of one. He claimed that the inquiry represented "one of the greatest injustices done to a presidential candidate and a president."
The majority of the report focused on the beginnings of the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation, in which agents looked into possible connections between Trump, members of his campaign, and the Russian government.
Durham stated that at the start of the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community "appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings." He also emphasized that important intelligence figures including CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey were aware of the Clinton campaign's plot to construct a story about Trump-Russia cooperation as early as August 2016.
"Both the press and the FBI abandoned any semblance of professionalism and took up the cause with a vengeance," Barr continued.
The former attorney general acknowledged that Trump would gain from the report's conclusions in the short term, but he parted with Trump after the 2020 presidential election and does not plan to back him in 2024.
"From the FBI's standpoint, I believe the true story here is what an awful this so-called inquiry was. Barr stated this week on Fox News that if it wasn't a witch hunt, it was a darn decent approximation of one. He claimed that the inquiry represented "one of the greatest injustices done to a presidential candidate and a president."
The majority of the report focused on the beginnings of the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation, in which agents looked into possible connections between Trump, members of his campaign, and the Russian government.
Durham stated that at the start of the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community "appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings." He also emphasized that important intelligence figures including CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey were aware of the Clinton campaign's plot to construct a story about Trump-Russia cooperation as early as August 2016.
"Both the press and the FBI abandoned any semblance of professionalism and took up the cause with a vengeance," Barr continued.
The former attorney general acknowledged that Trump would gain from the report's conclusions in the short term, but he parted with Trump after the 2020 presidential election and does not plan to back him in 2024.
