Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance said on MSNBC that the contents of an upcoming Justice Department Attorney General's report about the investigation into Russia's alleged meddling with President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign will indicate that the deep state doesn't exist. Vance also said Attorney General William Barr's implication that Trump's campaign had been spied on by the F.B.I. was "made-up."
Not expected to be released until December 9, the report also says the wiretap on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page's phone was not politically motivated, according to The New York Times.
"This discloses that there were some issues with some of the lawyers over at the FBI," said Vance. "Problems like that need to be rooted out. They need to be taken very seriously."
"The good news is that there's no indication that that isolated issue impacted any of the work that was being done by the FBI here," Vance continued. "It didn't result in a prosecution of Carter Page. And the important takeaway is that everything that President Trump has been saying for the last couple of years about the deep state and the effort by the Obama Justice Department to attack his campaign, that's all been made up. None of it was true."
"But it was fomented and it was really put into progress, as much as by the president, by his attorney general, Bill Barr, who famously went in front of Congress and talked about spying, which is not what the Justice Department does," she added. "The Justice Department does court-ordered supervision or court-ordered evidence collection. The notion that the attorney general would call it 'spying' was shocking to many of us then, and the inspector general report confirms that it was indeed untrue."
Barr told Congress in April that he believed Trump's campaign had been spied on by the American intelligence community and that it was a "big deal."
"I think spying did occur," Barr said. "The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting that it wasn't adequately predicated. But I need to explore that."
Barr failed to give any evidence to bolster his claim of F.B.I. spying, but did say that he felt he had "an obligation to make sure that government power is not abused. I think that is one of the principal roles of the attorney general."
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Barr had gone "off the rails" after his testimony, adding that Barr was "the attorney general of the United States of America, not the attorney general of Donald Trump," according to The Hill.
