Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Thursday that he could not back a congressional effort to make special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report public unless lawmakers tasked an entirely new special counsel with probing the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, among other things.
On Thursday morning, the House passed—without a single no vote—a nonbinding resolution to make the Mueller report public.
Hours later, Graham went to the floor aiming to file an amendment to the version the Senate would take up. It called for Attorney General William Barr to appoint a new special counsel to investigate “misconduct” in the Department of Justice over the email investigation and the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page, a former aide to the Trump campaign.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Any American out there who did what Secretary Clinton did, you'd be in jail now,” Graham declared. “The question I want to know is, does anybody other than me believe that?”
“We let Mueller look at all things Trump related to collusion and otherwise. Somebody needs to look at what happened on the other side and find out if the FBI and the DOJ had two systems, one supporting the person they wanted to win and one out to get the person they wanted to lose.”
“If the shoe were on the other foot,” Graham said. “All hell would pay.”
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was on the floor pushing for the Senate to take up the Mueller resolution, was left shaking his head as Graham advanced his argument, which echoed President Trump’s frequent attacks on the Mueller probe and the Department of Justice.
“This amendment appears to be a pretext for blocking this very simple, noncontroversial resolution,” said Schumer. “I have absolutely no idea why a member of this body would object to this basic level of transparency whatever their concern on other issues.”
