Attorney General William Barr Friday diverged from President Trump’s insistence that Obama officials engaged in “treason” during their investigation into the 2016 election.
When asked in a televised interview if he thought the officials “committed treason,” Mr. Barr said, “not as a legal matter, no.”
But he agreed he has concerns about how the investigation was conducted.
“Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system we have,” he said.
This opinion breaks from Mr. Trump’s, who tweeted in mid-May: “My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!”
Mr. Trump granted Mr. Barr the authority to review classified information and directed the intelligence community to “quickly and fully cooperate” with an investigation into the beginnings of the Russia investigation and whether the president’s 2016 campaign was illegally spied on.
• Bailey Vogt can be reached at bvogt@washingtontimes.com.
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