Former Trump Opponent Lindsey Graham Just Smoked Jim Comey on National TV
Former presidential candidate and Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham was no friend of Donald Trump during the 2016 election season and has often had choice words for the president.
It seems he’s shifted his outlook on some things, however, particularly in regard to Trump’s battles with biased “deep state” members of the bureaucracy like fired FBI Director James Comey.
Graham has also been honest in publicly recognizing how many of Trump’s policies have America “winning” again and has become a fairly reliable supporter in the Senate on most issues, a position he made clear during an appearance Thursday evening on “Fox News @ Night” with Shannon Bream.
Toward the end of the segment, Bream asked Graham for his lawyer take on Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report recommending criminal charges be filed against fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was found to have lied under oath multiple times to internal investigators about unauthorized leaks to the media.
“Well, Mr. Horowitz has a reputation: be fair minded. He was basically a Democrat, but I think he’s doing a good job,” Graham said. “The attorneys can say what they would like, but it would bother me greatly if I was Mr. McCabe’s lawyer to have the inspector general say, ‘I believe a crime was committed here.'”
“Now, Mr. McCabe is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. But I think this is just another example how corrupt the Department of Justice was,” he continued.
“And one thing about Comey, Rudy (Giuliani) was a good choice by President Trump to be on his legal team. But I have been a prosecutor and a defense attorney long before I got into politics. If Jim Comey were my witness, I don’t think I would have a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing anybody that he’s reliable,” Graham added.
That is about as damning a condemnation of Comey as we’ve heard from anyone outside of the Trump administration, and it carries some weight coming from a U.S. senator with prior legal experience who also sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
If even this lawyer-turned-senator claims he would have trouble defending Comey’s actions, that should go a long way toward undermining the saint-like portrayal of Comey by some in the media.
As for the rest of the segment, the conversation began with the legislation circulating within Graham’s Judiciary Committee that would implement protective “checks and balances” on the president’s authority to fire a special counsel like Robert Mueller in the future.
Graham downplayed the significance of the move and made it clear he didn’t believe President Trump had any intentions of firing Mueller and would emerge from the SC probe exonerated.
The discussion then shifted to the nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be secretary of state. Graham wholeheartedly supported the nominated, but it has received threats of obstruction from most Senate Democrats and a couple Republicans. Graham said that Trump deserved to have the people he has chosen for his cabinet to be confirmed with no delay.
The topic shifted to the rumored forthcoming denuclearization of North Korea, a stunning turn of events after decades of a volatile relationship filled with threats of mutual destruction.
Graham gave full credit for this shocking change to President Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric toward the despotic communist regime, which he believed convinced North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that Trump was “serious” about using military force to stymie any attempt at hitting the U.S. homeland with a ballistic missile or nuclear weapon.
You can watch the entire interview between Graham and Bream below:
Graham may have started off as a Trump-hater, but he appears to have managed to put aside any issues he once had with the president and is now unafraid to voice his strong support for Trump’s agenda and policy, at least when they are in alignment with his own.
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