Once upon a time, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was concerned about the belligerence that President Donald Trump displays — but not anymore. This weekend on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, he sought to defend the Trump team against allegations of impropriety surrounding their dealings with Ukraine by going all in behind the corruption allegations the Trump team have been peddling against the Bidens in conversations with Ukrainian leadership and others.
The idea from the Trump team is that former Vice President Joe Biden acted inappropriately in pressuring Ukrainian authorities to dismiss a widely considered corrupt top prosecutor because that prosecutor had been handling an inquiry into a company that Joe’s son Hunter worked with. The problem is that there’s no concrete evidence of an actually acted upon conflict of interest in this situation — but that didn’t stop Graham, who’s most recently taken steps like calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate the investigators (including the first special counsel) in the Russia investigation.
Asked if he was calling for an investigation into the Bidens over their dealings in Ukraine, Graham told Bartiromo:
‘Yeah, I want the Department of Justice to appoint somebody to look at the role the Ukraine played if any in the 2016 elections. There are a lot of allegations out there how Ukraine fed information maybe to the Democrats. You can’t have it one way, you can’t look at one family and not the other. I don’t trust the media to do this, I’m hoping somebody in the Department of Justice will appoint an investigator to look at all things Ukraine like we looked at all things Russia.’
Considering Graham’s at times ardent opposition to even the appearance of investigation into his political allies in the face of “allegations,” apparently allegations magically become worth looking into if they’re against his political opponents — whether or not there’s even much or any evidence behind them.
Illustrating his partisan disconnect, in the very same interview with Bartiromo, Graham complained about the publicity that allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump-nominated U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh have received, and he personally launched into an infamous angry rant during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings about how horribly the judge was supposedly being treated in the face of other allegations like that.
Trump even tweeted a quote from his Sunday interview portion where he denounced even just wanting to consider the serious allegations against Kavanaugh — Trump has personally made similar denunciations many times.
For his part, he claims that the scrutinized conversations he had with Ukrainian leadership were “perfect,” although he did seem to admit that he discussed the Bidens with them.
He told reporters:
‘We had a great conversation. The conversation we had was largely congratulatory… was largely about the corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely about the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine. Ukraine has a lot of problems… we had a great conversation. We had a conversation about many things.’
How convincing.
Trump, looking very red, basically admits he asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to look into Biden during call that’s part of whistleblower complaint: “It was largely [about] fact that we don’t want our people like VP Biden & his son creating to the corruption largely in Ukraine” pic.twitter.com/2hvkTbHSJl
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2019
Featured Image via screenshot
