Attorney General Barr: I’ve Received No Satisfactory Answers About ‘Spying’ On Trump Campaign

Attorney General William Barr recently sat down with CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford and provided insights on many of the issues that have resurfaced after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Wednesday morning press conference, the interview of which aired Friday morning.

Barr raised eyebrows roughly two months ago when during Congressional testimony he said that he believed “spying” had gone on during the 2016 general election, adding that he thought it was a “big deal” for Justice Department officials to be spying on a candidate, then clarifying that it may not be inappropriate if it was legal and there was an appropriate predicate for said surveillance.

Crawford noted the criticism he’s received for using that word, to which Barr dismissed by saying “I guess it’s become a dirty word somehow. It never has been for me. ” He then added “I don’t think it’s a question of spying. It’s whether it’s allowed by law.”

Crawford eventually followed by asking the embattled Attorney General “what evidence have you seen? What’s made you say, I’ll take look at this?”

Barr responded: “Like many others regarding intelligence activities, I had a lot of questions. I went in and got no answers that are satisfactory and, in fact, probably have more questions and some of the facts I’ve learned don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened?”

After Crawford pushed for clarity, Barr shut it down, ending this portion of the interview with “that’s really all I will say.”

Since the Mueller report was delivered to Barr two months ago, President Donald Trump and his political allies have turned up the heat on a deep look at the origins of the Russian probe, frequently calling it an “attempted coup” and even going so far to suggest that senior intel and DOJ officials under the Obama administration will see prison time as a result of this “investigation into the investigation.”

Watch above via CBS News.