Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has picked a side in the “spying” debate.
At the SALT conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Sessions was asked to respond to FBI Director Christopher Wray disputing Attorney General William Barr’s use of the word “spying” to describe surveillance of President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“I think Chris Wray — didn’t he say that’s one way of saying it? He wouldn’t have said it that way,” Sessions said. “I think that ‘spying’ is a perfectly good word.”
On Tuesday, Wray testified to a budget panel that would not use the word.
“That’s not the term I would use,” Wray testified. “To me the key question is making sure it’s done by the book, consistent with our lawful authorities. That’s the key question; different people use different colloquial phrases.”
The debate over the term began at a hearing last month when Barr said “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign. He clarified that he hasn’t proven there was any wrongdoing and is looking into alleged misconduct within in the Justice Department and FBI, but his “spying” declaration riled Democrats and others.
At a Democratic retreat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Barr went “off the rails.” Former FBI Director James Comey, who led the bureau when it opened its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, said “the FBI doesn’t spy, the FBI investigates.”
Following revelations that the FBI sent an undercover agent to meet with George Papadopoulos in London in 2016, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper conceded that what the FBI had been doing “meets the dictionary definition of spying.”
Sessions also noted that FBI’s use of undercover agents could be considered spying, adding that he wants to see more facts come out.
Sessions was participating in a panel alongside former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is a former federal prosecutor. He offered his take on the debate, saying, “There’s legal spying and illegal spying — but both are spying.”
