Attorney General William P. Barr also withdrew the results of the investigation. Weeks after being sworn in last year, Barr said he would examine his origins and made it clear that he believes it was opened without a legitimate justification. He also raised the possibility that members of the Trump campaign were unduly spied on, and this month he decided to drop the Justice Department case against former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to researchers in the Russian survey.
Trump and his allies point to the department’s decision to investigate and prosecute Flynn as evidence that Obama-era officials tried to undermine the president before he even took office. Republican senators recently released a list of Obama administration officials who, during the presidential transition, asked for the identity of an unidentified American who appeared in intelligence reports by the National Security Agency. The process, called unmasking, revealed that the American was Flynn, Trump’s new national security adviser; however, it was not clear what the intelligence reports were about.
The people who requested the unmasking included several former intelligence officers who were vocal critics of Trump, including John O. Brennan, the former CIA director, and Mr. Comey, as well as former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumed Democratic presidential candidate. After the names were released, Trump accused the Obama administration of trying to undermine him.
Barr has now appointed John F. Bash, the US attorney for the Western Texas District, to review “certain aspects of the unmasking,” said Justice Department spokesman Kerri Kupec on Wednesday night in an interview for the television.
“The frequency, motivation and reasoning behind unmasking can be problematic,” she told Fox News. “To look specifically at who was unmasking who can add a lot to the understanding of motivation and general events.” The findings of the unmasking review would help support the criminal investigation conducted by John H. Durham, the leading federal prosecutor in Connecticut, as to why the FBI attempted to investigate the Trump campaign in 2016.
After the Mueller report was released, Barr asked Durham to investigate the department’s decision to open the investigation, known internally as Hurricane Crossfire.
Former law enforcement officials involved in the investigation have long defended the decision to open it, saying that ignoring growing suspicions about Russia’s interference and information that a Trump campaign adviser had inside information about it would have been abandoned.