Trump says he’ll be ‘disappointed’ if IG report goes against him

President Trump on Tuesday said he would be “a little disappointed” if reports prove true that a forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report finds the FBI was justified in investigating former Trump campaign associates.

“The IG report is a very important report. If what I read is correct … that will be a little disappointing, but it was just one aspect of the report,” Trump said during a meeting with the NATO secretary general.

“We’ll see what happens,” he continued. “It’s coming out in a few days. I hear it’s devastating.”

The president has spent months hyping the inspector general’s report, which is due to be released publicly next week. He has said that it will validate his long-held but unsubstantiated claim that his campaign was improperly spied on and targeted by high-ranking Obama administration officials.

The Washington Post reported late Monday that Attorney General William Barr has told associates he does not agree with an expected key finding of the inspector general’s report that the FBI had sufficient basis for launching an investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016.

Barr has previously said he believes spying did occur but that he wanted to see if it was properly predicated.

Barr himself is not quoted in the Washington Post report, and a Justice Department spokeswoman said late Monday that people should “draw their own conclusions about” the inspector general’s findings once his work is made public next week.

Trump said Tuesday he has not personally seen the report, but he insisted based on outside documents he’s reviewed that it’s “very powerful.”

He added that Barr may have been misquoted.

“I do believe that because I’m hearing the report is very powerful, but I’m hearing that by reading lots of different things, not from inside information,” Trump said. “It’s really from outside information.”

“I think we have to read it, we have to see it, but I hear there’s a lot of devastating things in that report, but we’ll see what happens,” he said in London. “Look, we have a few days to wait. We’ve been waiting a long time.”