President Donald Trump on Friday defended his Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, denying that he was waging payback on those who investigated him for almost three years.
Trump on Thursday issued a directive to the country’s intelligence agencies to cooperate with the investigation, which he has pledged will turn up evidence of a politically motivated “witch hunt.
” He also gave Attorney General William Barr sweeping authority to declassify documents in the probe as he sees fit.Asked about Barr’s inquiry Friday, Trump dismissed charges that he was seeking to get revenge on the investigators he has accused of treason.
"This is about finding out what happened,” he said, referring to the Russia investigation once again as “an attempted takedown" of his presidency.
“We're going to find out what happened and why it happened,” he continued. “Let me just tell you. It's not payback. I don't care about payback. I think it's very important for our country to find out what happened.”
Barr has repeatedly backed the president up on the issue, appointing a U.S. attorney to look into the matter in addition to investigations already being pursued by one other federal prosecutor and the department’s internal watchdog.
While several former and current DOJ officials have defended the legality of the investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia and whether Trump obstructed that probe, Barr fueled Trump’s claims that he was improperly investigated in a series of interviews this month.
"I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions, and I've found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I've gotten don't hang together, in a sense I have more questions today than when I first started," Barr told Fox News.
He defended the investigation as necessary to make sure top law enforcement officials weren't trying to "put their thumb on the scale" when investigating Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016.And Trump had high praise for Barr’s efforts on Friday, noting that his allies had been clamoring for declassifying documents related to the investigation for a year.
“The attorney general is one of the most respected people in this country, and he has been for a long period of time,” the president said. “He's going to look at a lot of documents. Some he might find interesting, maybe he’ll find none interesting. But for over a year, people have asked me to declassify. So what I've done is, I've declassified everything.”
Trump said he was encouraging the attorney general to use a broad scope, expressing hope that Barr “looks at everything. Because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine