McCarthy says Trump was investigated for Obama

Andrew McCarthy

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out that counterintelligence operations by the FBI, Justice Department and are carried out for the president.

So it would have been the responsibility of the Obama administration's counterintelligence investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign to make sure Barack Obama knew what was going on, he said in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night.

"What I'm saying is not that the president sits there and directs that there be counterintelligence investigations, McCarthy explained, according to BizPacReview. "What I'm saying is that unlike criminal investigations, counterintelligence investigations are done for the president."

He said the "only reason to do them is to inform the president with the information he needs to protect the United States from foreign threats."

TRENDING: Ben Carson tells off Maxine Waters for lack of 'basic manners'

"And here we know at various junctures we have actual factual information that this investigation was well-known to President Obama," McCarthy said.

"If things were working properly, the president should have been alerted about it and informed about it – it was a very important investigation," McCarthy said. "If they actually believed what they were telling the court, that it was a possibility that Donald Trump was actually a plant of the Kremlin, it would have been derelict on their part not to keep the president informed."

Attorney General William Barr has appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion claim, which was debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller's two-year, $32 million investigation.

It's already known that an unverified, anti-Trump dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee played a major role. The document, despite its wild, unsubstantiated claims, was used by the Obama FBI and DOJ as evidence to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., also spoke with Hannity on Tuesday. He predicted the impending report by the Justice Department inspector general on alleged FISA abuse will be "damning" for Obama and his officials.

"I think it’s going to be really damning and ugly and people did some really bad things that are dangerous for the country, but you'll only find it on Fox," he said.

A poll showed Americans believe Obama surveilled the Trump campaign and possibly even his administration.

Trump has said Obama must have known what was going on.

WND reported James Rybicki, who served as chief of staff to former FBI Director James Comey, suggested in sworn testimony that the Trump-Russia collusion investigation was orchestrated by Obama's White House.

Rybicki made the claim in October 2016, according to newly released bureau documents.

A heavily redacted transcript of Rybicki's interview with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel includes an unidentified prosecutor's summary of the former FBI official's testimony.

"So we understand," the prosecutor says, "that at some point in October of 2016, there was, I guess, a desire by the White House to make some kind of statement about Russia's."

The next page is omitted.

Lawyer Ty Clevenger obtained the documents as part of a lawsuit. Clevenger explained that the OSC prosecutors were noting that the FBI publicized its reactivation of the Clinton email investigation shortly before the 2016 election. So, why, the prosecutors wondered, did the FBI not counterbalance that disclosure by publicizing the "Russian collusion" investigation into Donald Trump?

It was in that context that one of the prosecutors commented that the White House wanted some kind of statement made about Russia.

In April, James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence, responded in a CNN interview to President Trump's claim that the previous administration did nothing about Russian meddling in U.S. elections.

Clapper affirmed Obama is responsible for the claims of Trump-Russia collusion that roiled Washington for two years but were debunked by Mueller.

"If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, special counsel Mueller’s investigation," Clapper said at the time.

The intelligence community assessment to which he refers addressed Russia meddling in general. And that was the special counsel's task as well. But it's clear that Obama officials, including Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, were promoting the Trump-collusion allegation. And that claim was the focus of Mueller's probe.

Clapper confirmed: "President Obama is responsible for that, and it was he who tasked us to do that intelligence community assessment in the first place. I think it's an important point when it comes to critiquing President Obama."