Removing obstacles to Trump 2020

Attorney General William Barr announced Monday that he would raise the threshold for opening counterintelligence probes into presidential campaigns after accusations that the investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign was flawed.

Now, investigations into presidential candidates will require the signature of the attorney general and the head of the FBI, Barr said in a news conference with FBI Director Christopher Wray.

  The Hill

And Barr won't sign off on any investigation into Trump's campaign.

Wray announced Friday that the FBI would toughen its procedures when asking to open electronic surveillance in certain cases.

Former Justice Department official David Kris has been nominated to help advise on proposed changes, but Trump criticized the selection, saying Kris has “zero credibility.”

Did Kris say something bad about Trump?

Taking a cue from a GOP ally, President Trump on Sunday attacked a former senior Justice Department official appointed by a federal judge to review the FBI’s proposed wiretap application reforms in the wake of a critical inspector general report.

“You can’t make this up! David Kris, a highly controversial former DOJ official, was just appointed by the FISA Court to oversee reforms to the FBI’s surveillance procedures. Zero credibility. THE SWAMP!” Trump tweeted.

In his tweet, Trump seemed to reference an interview between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and host Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” On the show, Nunes accused Kris of “defending dirty cops” and “accusing [Nunes] of federal crimes.”

  WaPo

Ah. He said something bad about Nunes.

“You can’t make it up,” Nunes said. “I guess we’re just going to have to abolish this whole FISA system at this point and try to build something new.”

So Trump actually parroted Nunes. You can't make it up.

Nunes’s ire at Kris was provoked by comments Kris made in blog posts after Nunes released a memo in 2018 alleging FBI and Justice Department abuses in seeking to wiretap Page as a suspected agent of the Russian government.

“The Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy,” Kris wrote on the blog Lawfare.

[...]

Kris also took issue with Nunes’s claim then that the FBI misled the court about Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was a source of information in the wiretap application and renewal requests. “Today we know that it was not true,” wrote Kris, who in the early 2000s was involved in creating new FBI rules to make national security wiretap applications more accurate.

Horowitz’s report, however, concluded that Steele’s information “played a central and essential role” in the decision to seek a wiretap on Page.

[...]

Kris is not shy about criticizing the government when he feels it is overstepping legal bounds. In 2006, he publicly rebuked the Bush administration over its legal justifications for warrantless domestic wiretapping.

[...]

The court’s presiding judge, James E. Boasberg, on Friday named Kris to help the court assess the steps the FBI has taken and plans to take to address the flaws exposed by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his review last month of a wiretap application for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.