While Democrats grilled Attorney General Bill Barr on Wednesday over his mishandling of the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee used their time at the hearing to stoke the flames of conspiracy theories about the investigation into President Donald Trump and his campaign.
Essentially, the GOP and right-wing media have been arguing for years that the Russia probe was built on a flimsy basis that was really just a pretextual excuse to inappropriately surveil (or spy on!) the Trump campaign. This would seem to be completely belied by the Mueller report, which shows that there were many credible bases for investigating crimes, including extensive contacts between people connected to the Russian government and the Trump campaign. And while all that was going on, the Kremlin was, in fact, conducting a wide-ranging criminal effort to interfere in the 2016 election, efforts the Trump campaign knew about and welcomed.
In a back-and-forth between Sen. Ted Cruz and Barr on Wednesday, though, the Texas Republican accidentally elicited information that also completely undermines from another angle the theory that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department and FBI were somehow engaged in an effort to target the Trump campaign.
View the complete May 1 article by Cody Fenwick on the National Memo website here.