Former vice president Joe Biden was reportedly one of the select Obama administration officials who in an early stage of intelligence operations officially joined secret meetings about concerns of suspected Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The operations turned out to be more of a free pass for spying on at least four Trump campaign staff members.

Now that Attorney General William Barr has appointed U.S. attorney Michael Horowitz as Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate the origins of the Russia collusion claims, Biden’s mostly unreported role in meetings sparks further questions about what he, Obama, and Hillary Clinton knew about the spying on Trump staffers.

“[Joe Biden] was vice president and presided over the biggest political scandal in history,” Jason Meister, an advisory board member for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told The Epoch Times.

“High ranking Obama-Biden appointees used a phony dossier … to fraudulently obtain a warrant from the FISA court to wiretap, phone-tap, and email-tap Trump and his associates who were all private citizens.”

The dossier, which played a vital role in the opening of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, was produced by the controversial Fusion GPS firm which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee via the Perkins Coie law firm.

Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who has been credited with creating the dossier, alongside Glenn Simpson, co-founder of the political research firm Fusion GPS, spread it to members of the media and Congress, as well as the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department.

Barr himself commented last week that the intelligence’s early handling of the Russia probe might raise questions of its own. He pinpointed that it was first managed at a “very senior level” and later by a “small group.”

In an interview on Fox News, Barr stated:

“The thing that is interesting about this is that this was handled in a very senior level of these departments. It wasn’t handled in the ordinary way that investigations or counterintelligence activities are conducted. It was sort of an ad hoc small group. Most of these people are no longer with the FBI or the CIA or the other agencies involved.”

A key player in starting the investigation into the Trump campaign was Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who has acknowledged in public interviews and in congressional testimony that the agency had obtained unofficial foreign intelligence on the Trump campaign, which Brennan then passed on to the FBI.

At first, including Brennan, only four senior Obama administration officials were allowed access to the Russia intelligence; Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey, Washington Post reported.

The CIA captured Putin’s specific instructions – defeat Clinton and help elect Trump https://t.co/pg3KwjDURR pic.twitter.com/DC4ZH1WaXz — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 23, 2017

The circle then gradually widened including Biden and others. Agendas were sent to Cabinet secretaries John F. Kerry at the State Department and Ashton B. Carter at the Pentagon.

Last week a transcript (pdf) was posted containing questions posed by Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee during the December 2018 House Judiciary Committee hearing on allegations of Trump campaign staff members colluding with Russia.

Lee claims that four members of the Trump campaign staff, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn were suspected of being Russian assets and were put under FISA investigation.

The almost two-year-long inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller, which finalized in March, showed that there was no proof to sustain the claims of plotting to collude or obstruction of justice for the president contained in the dossier.

Biden spoke last January to the Council on Foreign Relations, fending off accusations that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign and waited until after the election to make the Russia interference charges public.

According to President Trump, however, it was the Democrat’s conflated self-confidence that made them wait so long for bringing out the allegations. He expressed his thoughts on Twitter:

The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win.. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

“The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win … and did not want to ‘rock the boat.’ He didn’t ‘choke,’ he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good.”

Epoch Times reporter Jasper Fakkert contributed to this report.