Trump ally and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not having a good weekend. You’d think that as a leader who in theory is supposed to be concerned with national security, he’d want to scrutinize why a president of the United States asked a foreign leader for favors to help his re-election campaign. Graham does not — instead, he prefers going on shows like Face The Nation with Margaret Brennan, where this weekend he launched into an angry, shouting rant in which he insisted that relaying the basic facts that the White House themselves revealed was a matter of “opinion.” So he’s completely lost touch with reality or something. Again.
At the center of the scandal is a whistleblower who sounded an alarm about Trump’s effort to recruit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the cause. In response, Graham railed:
‘Every American deserves to confront their accuser. So this is a sham as far as I’m concerned. I want to know who told the whistleblower about the phone call. I want to know why they changed the rules about whistleblowers — the hearsay rule was changed just a short period of time before the complaint was filed. The complaint sounds like a legal document — who helped this guy write it or this girl write it. We’re not going to try the president of the United States based on hearsay.’
The complaint is fundamentally not just hearsay. Key allegations about what the president said to Zelensky are confirmed by the call record that the White House itself released, but that did not seem to faze Graham.
“We’re not going to try the president of the United States on hearsay,” @LindseyGrahamSC tells @margbrennan of impeaching @realDonaldTrump. pic.twitter.com/eZvLm7Myl9
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) September 29, 2019
Brennan pointed out:
‘You wanted the president to release the call record. The complaint, on a number of fronts, is matched by the call record.’
After a bit of back-and-forth in which Brennan insisted she was just “laying out the facts here,” Graham complained:
‘You’ve got an opinion, I’ve got an opinion. You’ve got me on the show to tell me what I think. I think Mueller did a good job for the country, and there was nothing there. I think this whole thing is a sham. I can’t believe we’re talking about impeaching the president based on an accusation based on hearsay. Who is this whistleblower? What bias do they have? Why did they pick this whistleblower to tell a hearsay story?.. What’s going on here?.. Republicans believe this president’s being persecuted. They don’t love Donald Trump and the way he does business. They like what he does… They believe that everybody’s out to get him.’
That sounds an awful lot like paranoia that has no place in an office where what’s done could affect the lives of countless people in the United States and even elsewhere.
.@LindseyGrahamSC has questions about who shared info with the whistleblower, saying “What I want to know – who told the whistleblower about the transcript.” pic.twitter.com/ElK9y4IZiV
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) September 29, 2019
Trump has personally responded to the growing scandal by insisting that his interactions with Zelensky were “perfect,” while House Democrats have gotten their formal impeachment inquiry rolling with measures like a subpoena demanding documents from the State Department related to the administration and president’s interactions with Ukrainian leadership.
Featured Image via screenshot
