Washington (CNN) Valerie Plame, a congressional candidate who was a CIA officer during the Bush administration before her identity was revealed, said Monday that Attorney General William Barr was wrong to use the word "spying" to describe surveillance of President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

"I absolutely do not (believe spying occurred). These are professionals in our intelligence community, both in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the CIA. I have to believe that what happened was that there was real cause. And the bar is extremely high to collect information particularly on a US citizen," Plame, a New Mexico Democrat, told CNN's John Berman on "New Day."

She continued, "So I don't know all the details of what led to that, but I think Attorney General Barr's rather casual assessment that the FBI spied on candidate Trump is a little too loose with the facts."

During testimony before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee last month, Barr suggested that Trump's campaign was spied on, saying he would be looking into the "genesis" of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation that began in 2016 of potential ties between the campaign and the Russian government.

"I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal," Barr said at the time, echoing some of the more inflammatory claims lobbed by the President for months, but declining to elaborate on his concerns. "I think spying did occur."

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