Endorsing Trump’s Firing of Inspector General, Barr Paints Distorted Picture

No. While Mr. Atkinson disagreed with it, he considered himself bound by it.

After Mr. Atkinson gave the complaint to Mr. Maguire, Steven E. Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, opined that the whistle-blower law did not apply because the complaint was not about an intelligence activity, so the administration could lawfully withhold it from Congress.

On Sept. 9, about a week after the deadline, Mr. Atkinson wrote to the intelligence oversight committees with the approval of Mr. Maguire, notifying them that a dispute had arisen over how the law applied to a whistle-blower complaint without disclosing its subject. Mr. Atkinson also wrote in a follow-up letter to Congress, “I understand that I am bound by the determination” of the Justice Department and “will continue to abide by that determination.”

The senior department official, defending Mr. Barr’s claim that Mr. Atkinson instead “ignored” the Justice Department’s interpretation, argued that if he had truly respected the Office of Legal Counsel’s role, he would not have told the oversight committees anything.

Yes. He claimed that the F.B.I. had opened its investigation into whether Trump campaign officials were coordinating with Russia’s election interference “without any basis.” But the official who decided to open the investigation, Bill Priestap, then the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division, did so on the basis of certain facts.

Specifically, after WikiLeaks started dumping out stolen Democratic emails believed to have been hacked by Russia and timed to disrupt the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Australia told the United States that two months earlier, a Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, had told one of its diplomats that Russia had offered to help the Trump campaign by anonymously disclosing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Defending Mr. Barr’s claim that the F.B.I. did not have “any basis” to open an investigation, the department official pointed to the apparent opinion of John H. Durham, a prosecutor whom Mr. Barr has assigned to reinvestigate the Russia investigators, that the F.B.I. should have opened a “preliminary investigation” rather than a “full investigation.”

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, concluded that the facts available to Mr. Priestap were an adequate basis for a full investigation, but said in testimony last year that Mr. Durham had disagreed with him and believed the factual basis for the inquiry only rose to the standard for a preliminary one.



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