Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Russia probe: “It seems to me now to be considered a criminal investigation” https://t.co/nr0IEZFIs4
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 18, 2017
On Thursday morning, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham visited with Fox News to speak about the DOJ’s appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia ties. Graham suggested that this was a good thing for Congress, so they could go back to digging into Hillary’s emails (really?), and he stated, “I don’t know what caused the appointment. I haven’t seen any evidence of a crime yet.” By afternoon, however, Graham uttered an interesting shift in thinking to the press, as evidenced at the end of the above CNN clip: “It seems to me now to be considered a criminal investigation.”
Perhaps this was not the exact terminology that Graham intended to drop at this point. He sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Graham is not privy to the DOJ’s inner workings. Yet he explained his reasoning further.
As Graham indicates in the next clip, he has not confirmed that this is a criminal probe, but “it is my takeaway” that Congress needs to treat this “as if it may be a criminal investigation.” This means that Congress wouldn’t be able to access the DOJ’s information on any criminal aspect. Further, Graham stated, “The biggest legal change seems to be that Mr. Mueller is going to proceed forward with the idea of a criminal investigation versus a counterintelligence investigation.” This would mean that Congress had best not cross into Mueller’s lanes, but Graham also admits that he hasn’t been given the facts to say this is a done deal. Watch below.
Trump began Thursday morning with a (misspelled) tweet-tantrum, in which he whined about the special counsel and said he was being treated differently than Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Later, he told the press that the appointment “hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country.”