(Bloomberg) -- Attorney General William Barr has begun to fill in details on his controversial pledge to investigate whether the FBI and Justice Department engaged in improper "spying" on the Trump campaign in 2016.In a contentious hearing this week on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Democrats accused Barr of sounding like President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. But some Republicans encouraged him to lay out the contours of the nascent surveillance probe that he made clear is among his top priorities.
Barr told the Senate Judiciary panel that he has assembled a team to determine whether there was any improper "spying" on the Trump campaign in 2016, including whether intelligence collection began earlier than previously known and how many confidential informants the FBI used. He also suggested his focus was on senior leaders at the FBI and Justice Department at the time.
"To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people," Barr said.
His review also will examine whether a dossier that included salacious accusations against Trump was fabricated by the Russian government to dupe U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI, Barr told the Senate panel on Wednesday.
"We now know that he was being falsely accused," Barr said of Trump. "We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon."
Mueller’s report didn’t say there were false accusations against Trump. It said the evidence of cooperation between the campaign and Russia "was not sufficient to support criminal charges." Investigators were unable to get a complete picture of the activities of some relevant people, the special counsel found.