The high cost of William Barr’s spying allegations

Americans rightly expect their law enforcement and intelligence leaders to follow the president’s policies while avoiding the extremes of partisan politics, particularly with respect to individual cases and investigations. The perception and the reality must be that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies aren’t on the side of either political party or any individual politician. Against the background of President Donald Trump’s relentless efforts to politicize law enforcement and intelligence, Attorney General William Barr’s recent statements that he believes “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign in 2016 were problematic, for at least three reasons.

First, Barr’s statements supported a narrative that the FBI and intelligence community were acting improperly and illegally when they investigated links between the Trump campaign and Russian election interference. This is not principally because “spying” is a pejorative word (as compared, say, with “investigating”); both of us have used it to refer to wholly legitimate government surveillance in other contexts. It is instead because the word so obviously aligns with the president’s prior false attacks and complaints against the intelligence community, including his now-discredited complaint that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. As Benjamin Wittes wrote recently on Lawfare, Barr’s statements were “bound to play into ongoing conspiracy theories, promoted by the president himself, about the origins of the Russia investigation.” INTERDASTINGly more

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/the-high-cost-of-william-barrs-spying-allegations/