Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that there will be public disclosure of the Justice Department’s investigation into federal surveillance of the Trump campaign, and that Americans will recognize “some” of the names linked to the probe.
The team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham “has been working very aggressively to move forward” with the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into alleged FISA warrant abuses by federal authorities, Barr told Fox News’s Bret Baier in an interview Tuesday.
The attorney general said he is “very troubled” by what Durham’s probe has so far revealed, which follows earlier findings by the DOJ watchdog that uncovered 17 significant errors or omissions in FBI wiretap applications in the bureau’s investigation into former Trump adviser Carter Page, which was part of the broader inquiry into Russian interference into the 2016 election.
“Before the [2016] election, I think we’re concerned about the motive force behind the very aggressive investigation that was launched into the Trump campaign with a very thin, slender reed as a basis for it,” Barr told Fox News. “It seemed that the bureau was sort of spring-loaded at the end of July to drive in there and investigate a campaign.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Page are part of a broader pattern of questionable activities by senior law enforcement and intelligence officials, which include numerous unmasking requests targeting people affiliated with the Trump campaign.
Barr did not say whether any criminal charges might come about from the probe, but noted “the wheels of justice grind slow,” adding, “and they do run slow because we have due process and we follow the process.”
He said people should not assume that simply because no charging actions have been taken yet, that people “are going to get away with wrongdoing.”
At the time, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) did not say whether he expected any prosecutions from the DOJ’s review of the circumstances surrounding the launch of the investigation into the Trump campaign.
“We’re going to go where the evidence takes us, and I’m going to try to answer some basic questions about how it got so off the rails and try to explain to the public why the FISA court was so upset,” Graham said.
“I don’t know if anybody is going to go to jail. People went to jail in the Mueller investigation. Well, I think there are some people who are really good candidates for going to jail for manipulating the FISA application process and abusing the rule of law,” he said.
