to include a couple of presidential contenders. we ve got amy klobuchar and senator cory booker on the panels today, assumie ining thew up. they will press him on this key finding that there was no fbi plot to sabotage the trump campaign. that is, in fact, the key takeaway. it says this the inspector general and i m reading now from the report found no documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or motivation influenced the decisions to open the investigation. republicans, though, will press him on that same finding. so you ve got lindsey graham, who you well know leads the judiciary committee, also president trump s chief defender here on capitol hill. you ve got ted cruz, senator john kennedy. they, i suspect, will echo that deep skepticism that you heard from the attorney general in that exclusive interview that he gave pete williams. and here s the deal. even though this hearing in senate is not explicitly linked to what s happening over on the house side with imp
seem to have everything that s been a response to everything that the democrats have done. they announced impeachment charges, michael horowitz report. bill barr is out there. articles are introduced. horowitz testifies today. on one hand they get exactly what they want. they create sort of confusion about mueller, the obsession to get trump. that story is out there. it seems as if this is part of a strategy the way the trump administration has used the government to respond to impeachment. last night in hershey, pennsylvania, i was there, covering president trump s rally. he talked about the ig report. he talked about the ongoing impeachment inquiry. he claimed that he was spied on. this is the counternarrative that has been building on the trump campaign, on the white house side, the republican party for a long time. when you read the ig s report there was not an intention, according to horowitz, to spy.
evidence or ruling in any formal way against that. so, i think by and large, what s fascinating about today is this report mostly debunks what donald trump, and to some extent as you just reported, bill barr was gunning for, and yet, there still has to be this grand presentation of it. there are substantive things to get into, but it s not the witch hunt stuff. i was just going to say, the fisa is part of this, maya, that makes me think, all right, we probably have to overhaul the fisa process, but i think one of the things that gets lost here is that carter page is a very tiny slice of this investigation, and i think that s a problem here as we try to present what we re doing today and what s important, what isn t. this is important, but it s this important. i think that s really fairly said, chuck. i mean, as and ari, i think you covered this last night. if you look at how many people actually did wrong, who were caught doing wrong through a ross that worked that was not
fought this to a political draw. and that is why democrats need today and they need this trial in the senate to proceed in a fair way, chuck, because the president has pinned his argument that he s made to his base the past two years on this false premise that he was being unfairly persecuted by this russia investigation, that the impeachment now is simply an outgrowth of that. so what you ll see today based on democrats i ve talked to, is an attempt to try i emphasize try here but undo some of the damage that has been done by the attorney general, going back to how he handled the release of that report, which we are now finding out was completely legitimate and not politically motivated in its origins. if you remember, it was before the report even came up that barr declared wrongly that the report said no collusion. he also cleared trump on obstruction, even though mueller
geoff, do we expect the two parties to sort of play that they are going to end up doing the same thing, or being the senate, will we see some unusual, you know, nonpredictable questioners, is my point here, right? or is there going to be a democratic line of questioning and a republican line of questioning? or should we assume some differences? reporter: based on the reporting that we ve been doing and conversations with senators themselves in the hallways, i think that they have staekd out both sides have really staekd staked out their lines of defense and their lines of attacks. so, again, particularly with republicans and lindsey graham really keying in on what he says was the abuse of fisa warrants and all that. i think we have a good sense of how this four or five-hour-long hearing is going to go today. geoff bennett on capitol hill, thank you. let s go to the justice department, julia ainsley, the fallout from the ig report, attorney general bill barr s comments both publ