Former FBI Director James Comey pushed back on Attorney General William Barr use of the word spying to describe the surveillance the FBI conducted on President Trump’s 2016 campaign, saying the federal agency does not spy, but it investigates.
“Yeah I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Comey said when asked about Barr’s usage of the word on “CBS This Morning” on Wednesday. “The FBI doesn’t spy, the FBI investigates.”
“We investigated a very serious allegation, that Americans might be hooked up with the Russian effort to attack our democracy. The Republicans need to breathe into a paper bag,” he said.
Comey said if the investigation was centered around the same premise, but it involved Democrats instead, “[Republicans] would be screaming for the FBI to investigate, and that’s all we did.”
[Read: Devin Nunes reacts to FBI director: ‘Spying occurred, plain and simple’]
Barr was asked about using the word “spying” during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, after Democrats complained it unfairly pinned blame on the Obama administration for spying on a political adversary.
Barr said he thought it accurately described what occurred and criticized the media’s reaction.
“I’m not going to abjure the use of the word spying. I don’t think — you know, my first job was in the CIA — I don’t think the word spying has any pejorative connotation at all. To me the question is always whether or not it is authorized and adequately predicated, spying,” Barr said. “I think spying is a good English word that in fact doesn’t have synonyms because it is the broadest word incorporating all forms of covert intelligence collections. So I’m not going to back off of the word spying … and I use it frequently as the media.”
