This Thursday, Attorney General William Barr is sitting for testimony before Congress, just shortly after it came out that Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself dissented over the Trump appointee’s handling of the findings from his Russia probe. The issue this Thursday is — Trump shill Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who leads the committee, will not be serving as any sort of check on the attorney general’s behavior. During his opening statement, he melted down with everything from angry finger pointing at Hillary Clinton to lies about what the Mueller report actually says.
Graham rambled:
‘So what did we learn from this report? After all this time and all this money, Mr. Mueller and his team concluded there was no collusion… As to obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller left it to Mr. Barr to decide. After two years and all this time, he said — Mr. Barr, you decide.’
Those are lies. To be clear, the Mueller probe did not conclude there was no collusion. On the contrary, it concluded there was clear evidence that the Trump team had expected to benefit from assistance from the Russian government during the 2016 election — although Barr ever so conveniently left that part out during some of his public commentary on the report. All Mueller did conclude was that there was no criminally prosecutable conspiracy between the Trump team and Russia, which might as well be chalked up to them being too stupid to carry such a thing out, because it’s not for lack of trying. Trump Jr. said he loved the idea of dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Kremlin.
On top of that, there is absolutely no indication that Mueller actually wanted Barr to step in and declare Trump innocent of obstruction charges.
Those aren’t all the issues inherent in Graham’s opening statement however. During a hearing billed as covering “The Department of Justice’s Investigation of Russian Interference with the 2016 Presidential Election,” Graham launched into an angry rant about… wait for it… Hillary Clinton. He slammed the completely unrelated probe that the Justice Department conducted into her private email server use while on the job as Secretary of State, ranting that “We know that the person in charge of investigating hated Trump’s guts” and so, by some leap of imagination, he — meaning the now infamous Peter Strzok — was unable to do his job.
Reading off disparaging text conversations from years ago targeting Trump, Graham angrily railed:
‘These are the people who decided Clinton didn’t do anything wrong and that a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign was warranted!’
Why are we discussing Hillary Clinton at a hearing that has absolutely nothing to do with her private email server???
The amazing thing is that throughout the exact same period Graham read off some of Strzok’s angry texts from, he himself was on television railing against Trump! He railed against him as everything from “the world’s biggest jackass” to a “kook,” and now he wants us to take his moral high-horse seriously. Amazing.
Graham has failed in the face of an opportunity given him to serve as a leader for the United States through times when it’s democracy has been put in turmoil. Instead he’s complaining about completely unrelated issues.
Featured Image via screenshot
