The Anti–Bill Barr Smear Campaign

[Geee]

National Review

The campaign against Attorney General Bill Barr is in full swing. We are told that he’s a tawdry tool of Donald Trump, that he’s disgracing himself and sullying his reputation, that he’s the equivalent of a Roy Cohn, the sleazy lawyer who once represented Trump back in New York.

The criticism of Barr reached a crescendo this week after he used the word “spying” in congressional testimony to refer to the surveillance of Trump-campaign officials in 2016. The reaction to his testimony was absurdly over-the-top. Yes, the word “spying” has a negative connotation, but it’s functionally indistinguishable from “surveilling.” To wit: The FISA court that approves the FBI’s surveillance is sometimes referred to in the press as the “spy court.”

There is no doubt that Trump officials were surveilled or spied on. The FBI famously acquired a FISA warrant against Carter Page, who briefly served as a Trump foreign-policy adviser. It is true that the FBI began surveilling Page in October 2016 after he left the campaign, but the warrant allowed it to look back at his communications during his time with the campaign.