President Trump on Wednesday cheered Attorney General William P. Barr’s new review of the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016, saying it’s time to “fight back” against a treasonous attempt to invalidate his election.

“This was an attempted coup, an attempted takedown of a president,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “And we beat them. We fight back … because I knew how illegal this whole thing was.”

Mr. Barr said he has started a review of the Justice Department’s actions in launching the counterterrorism investigation codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane” in 2016, a probe that included wiretaps on a Trump campaign official. The attorney general told lawmakers Wednesday that he believes the FBI spied on the Trump campaign, doesn’t know whether there was a legal basis for the surveillance and doesn’t understand why the campaign’s top officials weren’t warned.

Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has called for a Justice Department task force to investigate how the probe got started.

The president, who said Mr. Barr is “doing a great job,” expressed hope that the attorney general is “getting started on going back to the origins of exactly where this all started.”

“There is a hunger for that to happen in this country like I have never seen before, including all of the millions of people that voted for me,” the president said. “What I’m most interested in is getting started. What has been found during this period of time are the illegal acts of getting this whole phony investigation started. And hopefully, that’s where people are going now.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the original FBI probe, concluded after a two-year investigation that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia’s efforts to meddle in the election.

Mr. Trump said the initial FBI probe started because “there were dirty cops,” citing former FBI Director James B. Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI lawyer Lisa Page and her paramour FBI agent, Peter Strzok.

“These were bad people,” the president said. “What they did was treason. It was an illegal investigation. Everything about it was crooked. And they got caught. What they did was against our Constitution and everything we stand for.”

The president said he still hasn’t read the Mueller report, which Mr. Barr intends to release to the public in redacted form within a week.

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care about the Mueller report,” Mr. Trump said. “I have not seen the Mueller report. I have not read the Mueller report. I have been totally exonerated. I won.”

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