Connecticut U.S. attorney will explore counterintelligence effort that attorney general called ‘spying’.

Attorney General William Barr has tapped the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to study the origins of a 2016 counterintelligence investigation that conducted what he has called “spying” on people affiliated with the Trump campaign, a person familiar with the decision said. John Durham, Connecticut’s U.S. attorney, is helping Mr. Barr look at the early stages of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia ...

His work marks the third ongoing investigation—including one being conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general—of law-enforcement actions in connection with the 2016 counterintelligence probe. President Trump’s Republican allies have long alleged that his associates were unfairly targeted for surveillance, and that investigators in the Justice Department and the FBI were politically prejudiced against Mr. Trump in a way that could have affected their work. FBI Director Christopher Wray and other officials have defended the bureau’s work.

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