Bill Barr’s Dangerous Claims
The attorney general has said the intelligence community was “spying” on the Trump campaign—language that risks a panoply of harms.
Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly used the word spying to refer to the counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Donald Trump’s team in 2016. Barr’s loose use of language risks a panoply of harms, undermining public confidence in three vital goods: the nonpartisan nature of the intelligence community’s work, the generally robust framework for intelligence oversight, and the facts and conclusions of the intelligence community itself.
Does Barr know what he’s saying? In a recent interview on CBS, Barr said that “as a lawyer, I always interpret the word not colloquially, but legally.” He also touted his intelligence background from his early days at
