Fox’s Chris Wallace: IG report headline is ‘It didn’t find the things that Bill Barr and Donald Trump alleged’

“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace said the headline on the highly anticipated report released Monday by the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG) will be that it “didn’t find the things that Bill Barr and Donald Trump alleged” regarding spying on the Trump campaign.

“Remember, this comes against the backdrop of Donald Trump talking about the investigation of him in 2016 as a political hit job,” Wallace said to “America’s Newsroom” anchors Bill Hemmer and Sandra Smith after the report was released. “At one point, he talked about President Obama ordering the wiretapping of the Trump Tower.”

“In one of his first hearings as attorney general, Bill Barr talked about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign and later said spying is not a pejorative word, I view it as a perfectly legitimate word and usually people talk about surveillance, not spying which would seem to have a negative connotation,” Wallace added. 

The watchdog report released Monday — while being critical of certain aspects of the FBI’s handling of the investigation — found the bureau was not motivated by political bias in opening investigations into associates of the Trump campaign in 2016.

Trump and his allies have long alleged the FBI acted improperly in its investigation and some in the GOP have already seized on the wrongdoing cited in the report.

“When you read the report, and we’re obviously all skimming through it, the headline is they didn’t find the things that Bill Barr and Donald Trump alleged,” Wallace said. “He found, [Inspector General] Michael Horowitz, found there was no political bias by [then-FBI Director] James Comey or his deputy, Andrew McCabe.”

“It certainly does say there were a lot of misstatements, improprieties, carelessness on the part of lower level FBI people,” Wallace continued before later adding, “There were some misconduct by individual people, but not by the higher-ups.”

The IG report says Horowitz “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations.”

Horowitz later concluded that the bureau had “an authorized purpose” to launch an investigation to “obtain information about, or to protect against, a national security threat or federal crime, even though the investigation also had the potential to impact constitutionally protected activity.”