White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Sunday said the president is looking for “transparency” on the FBI’s activities during the 2016 campaign, after he recently granted broad latitude to Attorney General William Barr to declassify related intelligence material.
“The bottom line here is there was a lot of corruption at the FBI and the DOJ,” Ms. Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We see constantly more and more things that have come out of that. And the president wants transparency and he’s given the attorney general the ability to put that transparency in place, make those decisions.”
She said there were elements within the Justice Department trying to “take down” the president.
“We’ll leave the final call up to the attorney general and he’ll get to the bottom of it. But we think Americans deserve the truth,” she said.
The president last week announced he was granting broad latitude to Mr. Barr to declassify intelligence tied to the FBI’s surveillance activities during the 2016 campaign.
Mr. Barr has asked a special prosecutor to look into the origins of the probe into whether the Trump campaign plotted with the Russians to influence the election.
Asked if Mr. Trump would accept “exoneration” if that’s what Mr. Barr finds, Ms. Sanders said she wasn’t going to get ahead of the final conclusion.
“But we already know that there was a high level of corruption that was taking place,” she said. “There’s a lot more there that we still need to know. And we’re going to let the attorney general do his job.”
Mr. Trump named former FBI Director James Comey, among others, when he was asked last week who he was referring to when he said people committed “treason.”
Asked if the president expects Mr. Comey to be arrested, Ms. Sanders said they’re going to leave things to Mr. Barr.
“But we certainly expect the people that were responsible and that were part of this unprecedented obstruction and corruption at the FBI, those people should certainly be held responsible and be held accountable and the president expects that to take place,” she said.
Democrats, meanwhile, say the president’s move will hurt U.S. intelligence agencies’ ability to do their jobs, and that Mr. Trump has ulterior motives in granting Mr. Barr the new authority.
“For the president of the United States to instruct the attorney general to do that … it looks like he’s using the attorney general to be his personal lawyer, rather than having the attorney general look at whether there are still ongoing threats to our country,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, California Democrat, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
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Source:Washington Times
