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Attorney General Bill Barr defended President Donald Trump's charge that the FBI and Justice Department spied on his 2016 presidential campaign, calling it a 'perfectly good word' that shouldn't be declared off bounds because the president uses it.

'It's part of the craziness of the modern day that if the president uses a word it all of a sudden becomes off bounds. It's a perfectly good English word. I'll continue to use it,' he told CBS' 'This Morning.'

'I guess it's become a dirty word somehow. It has never been for me,' he noted.

Attorney General Bill Barr defended President Donald Trump's charge that the FBI and Justice Department spied on his 2016 presidential campaign

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said his campaign was spied upon

Barr, in his first sit-down interview since Robert Mueller delivered his statement on his report, admitted he disagreed with some of 'legal analysis' in the special counsel's findings and said 'things are just not jiving' in his internal probe of how the Russia investigation started.

The attorney general also said he doesn't have a problem with spying - as long as it's legal. 

'I think there's nothing wrong with spying. The question is always of whether it's authorized by law,' Barr said. 

Trump has accused President Obama's administration of spying on his 2016 presidential effort.

Some officials - including current FBI Director Chris Wray - have objected to the president's use of the term 'spying' when referring to the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, arguing their work had been authorized by U.S. courts. 

The FBI was investigating whether Russian officials have infiltrated Trump's camp. 

Barr is looking into how all this began and Trump has given him extraordinary powers to do so - including the ability to declassify intelligence secrets as he sees fit.

FIRESIDE CHAT: Attorney General Bill Barr contradicted a central claim of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's press statement Thursday

Barr is investigating allegations that Trump's campaign was spied upon - a claim the president has made repeatedly without offering proof. 

The attorney general himself testified to the Senate in early April that he believed the president's campaign was spied up.

And he told CBS News that as he looks into the matter, he's getting more questions than answers. 

'Like many other people who are familiar with intelligence activities, I had a lot of questions about what was going on. I assumed I would get answers when I went in and I have not gotten answers that are at all satisfactory and, in fact, have probably have more questions and some of the facts I've learned don't hang together with the official explanations of what happened,' he said. 

When pressed for details Barr would only say: 'That's really all I will say, things are just not jiving.'

As for his relationship with the president, Barr said the two men speak directly and he doesn't consider a tweet from Trump a presidential directive. 

'I'm not on Twitter and every once in a while a tweet is brought to my attention. My experience with the president, we have a good working relationship. If he has something to say, I believe he'll tell me directly. I don't look to tweets as direct or official communications with the department,' he said. 

But the White House has a different view on the matter - officials have said the president's tweets are official statements.

'The President is the President of the United States, so they're considered official statements by the President of the United States,' then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters in June 2017, a few months after Trump took office. 

The attorney general also sounded unfazed by his critics.

'I am at the end of my career,' he told CBS News. 'Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?' 

Special counsel Robert Mueller speaks at the Department of Justice Wednesday, May 29, 2019, in Washington, about the Russia investigation

'There was no crime. There was no misdemeanor,' Trump said, asked if he expected to be impeached 

Barr also told the network  he believes Mueller could have decided to indict President Trump if he had evidence the president committed a crime.

Barr was able to get in a form of cross-country rebuttal hours after Mueller stunned the nation by finally breaking his silence on his 448-page report and its conclusions – including his in-depth investigation into whether the president obstructed justice. 

'I personally felt he could've reached a decision,' Barr told CBS News in an interview from Alaska, where he held a roundtable with native tribes just as Mueller was making his bombshell statement.

'The bottom line was that Bob Mueller identified some episodes. He did not reach a conclusion. He provided both sides of the issue, and his conclusion was he wasn't exonerating the president, but he wasn't finding a crime either,' he said.

Mueller had said the opposite: arguing that guidelines by DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel prohibited him from indicting the president while in office. He further argued it would be unfair to Trump to say he committed a crime, since Trump would not be able to defend himself through the criminal process absent a charge and a trial. 

'That is unconstitutional,' Mueller said – emphasizing that the fundamental reason not to charge Trump didn't have to do with guilt or innocence, but rather those foundational factors.   

'By regulation it was bound by that department policy,' said Mueller. 'Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.'    

Asked about Mueller's view, Barr told CBS: 'The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office, but he could've reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity.'

Then Barr backed off. 'But he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained and I am not going to, you know, argue about those reasons,' he said.

The attorney general also conceded the two men did not agree on the legal analysis of the special counsel's findings. 

'I think Bob said he was not going to engage in the analysis. He was not going to make a determination one way or the other. We analyzed the law and the facts and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that and determined that both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction,' Barr said.

'In other words we didn't agree with the legal analysis, a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department,' Barr added. 'It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers and so we applied what we thought was the right law.'

The two men, who have been friends for years and whose wives attended bible study, have been thrown into conflict by conditions of the Mueller probe. Mueller appeared to upbraid Barr in a March letter disputing how Barr characterized his report. And, on Wednesday, an aide distributed a document that revealed a split on how the charging issue was handed.

When Mueller didn't make a determination on whether Trump committee a crime, Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stepped in and decided not to charge Trump. They made their determination within 48 hours of Mueller turning in his report. 

Barr also responded to a common interpretation of Mueller's remarks: that he was setting the table for Congress to further probe what he uncovered in impeachment proceedings.  Mueller, in his remarks, noted that 'the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.' That process is impeachment.

'The Department of Justice doesn't use our powers of investigating crimes as an adjunct to Congress,' said Barr, in footage that aired hours after called impeachment a 'disgusting' word. Barr is currently engaged in a fierce standoff with congressional Democrats who are demanding the release of the full, un-redacted Mueller report.

Barr also defied a subpoena and refused to show up for a House Judiciary Committee hearing after Democrats dug in on demanding committee lawyers ask questions of the attorney general for an extended period. 

The attorney general said he would leave if up to Mueller as to whether the special counsel should testify before Congress.

'It's up to Bob, but I think the line he's drawing, which is he's going to stick to what he said in the report is the proper line for any department official,' Barr said.

Numerous Democrats took Mueller's comments Wednesday as an opportunity to call for the start of impeachment proceedings.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Democrats are demanding access to an un-redacted version

Asked Thursday if he expected to be impeached, Trump responded: 'I don't see how ... It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word ... It's a giant presidential harassment.'

Then he referenced the impeachment clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress may impeach the executive for 'high crimes and misdemeanors' – a phrase that is neither precisely defined nor limited. 

'There was no high crime. There was no misdemeanor,' Trump said.

Mueller told the country in a dramatic statement Wednesday that, 'If we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.'

The line directly contradicting President Trump's claim that he was 'completely exonerated' by the report. Trump and the White House responded that Mueller's remarks meant it was 'case closed.'