Senator Chuck Grassley, like many Americans, is expressing dismay at the delay of results from U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation into Obama administration abuse during the 2016 presidential election and the Mueller Special Counsel investigation.
.@realDonaldTrump #CommonSense IF NO PROSECUTIONS TIL AFTER ELECTIONS SAD SAD //just think Flynn Mueller Impeachment/ The deep state is so deep that ppl get away w political crimes/Durham shld be producing some fruit of his labor
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 6, 2020
During an interview with CBS News in May, Attorney General Bill Barr tamped down expectations of the Durham probe.
"If we were to find wrongdoing in the sense of any criminal act obviously we would follow through on that," Barr said. "Just because something may even stink to high heaven and appear everyone to be bad we still have to apply the right standard and be convinced there's a violation of the criminal statute that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The same standard applies to everybody."
That being said, Barr heavily criticized the way the FBI and Obama administration was operating/spying on Trump campaign officials.
"This was not a bonafide counterintelligence investigation. They were closing the investigation in December, they started that process and on January 4 they were closing it," Barr continued. "They initially tried some theories of how they could open an investigation which didn't fly and then they found out they had technically not closed the earlier investigation and they kept it open for the express purpose of trying to catch, lay a perjury trap for General Flynn. They didn't warn him the way we would usually be required by the Department. They bypassed the Justice Department. They bypassed the protocols at the White House and so-forth."
"These were things that persuaded me that there was not a legitimate counterintelligence investigation going on," he said.
Meanwhile the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Grassley used to be chairman, is conducting its own investigation into the abuse.
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