Democrats’ Obsession with Russia Probe Woke a Sleeping Giant

Graham Now Going on the Offensive

By C. Douglas Golden, WESTERN JOURNAL

Sen. Lindsey Graham 2.0 is back on the offensive, and he wants answers regarding a lot of the events that surrounded the 2016 election — those that don’t involve Donald Trump and Russian collusion.

Not only does he want answers, he wants a special counsel to investigate it.

In a news conference on Monday, the South Carolina Republican said he intended to launch a probe into a number of Obama-era scandals, including the assembling of the Trump dossier, the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and surveillance on the Trump campaign, according to The Hill.

“When it comes to the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant, the Clinton campaign, the counterintelligence investigation, it’s pretty much been swept under the rug,” Graham told reporters.

“Those days are over.”

And he also called for the appointment of a special counsel.

“What I want to do is seek to appoint a special counsel,” Graham told reporters.

Noting the divide between Republicans and Democrats, Graham said that “I’d like to find someone like a Mr. Mueller that could look into what happened with the FISA warrant, what happened with the counterintelligence investigation.”

Graham told reporters these were all issues that the media ignored in favor of supposed Russian collusion — something that didn’t exactly turn out well for them.

“The double standard here has been striking and quite frankly disappointing,” Graham said, according to The Washington Times.

Graham also said he wants a fairly extensive list of witnesses to testify before the committee.

The most obvious would be Attorney General William Barr, whom Graham says he’ll call to testify as to the results of the Mueller investigation. Beyond that, however, he’s going to have some very interesting characters appearing before the committee if he has his way.

One of them will be Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department figure who was a back channel to Trump dossier-assembler Christopher Steele.

Another one of them? James Comey.

The former FBI director would have to answer for, among other things, his role in approving the foreign intelligence surveillance warrant against Trump campaign aide Carter Page and his relationship with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the Clinton email investigation.

Graham, of course, has the ability to lead an investigation in his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A special counsel, on the other hand, would have to be appointed by the attorney general — although the Judiciary Committee could recommend it.

Either way, good.

“You haven’t had much scrutiny, but that’s coming,” Graham said.

And he’s right. For the past few years, the only scrutiny in Washington has been of the Trump administration and whether the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power to win the 2016 election.

That’s been put to bed. Now, it’s time to talk of other things that happened in the last part of the Obama administration: The questionable way the Trump dossier was assembled; the way the dossier was used to obtain the FISA warrant, the odd evidentiary standard set by the Department of Justice in the Clinton investigation; the fact that the Trump campaign appears to have been spied on by the FBI.

All of these things are what we should have been talking about along with the special counsel investigation.

Instead, it was all Russian “collusion” and the specter of impeachment.

Well, the Republicans may have been on the defensive until the Mueller report got released, but they’re on the offensive now — and Graham is leading the charge.