Graham won’t make Obama give testimony, but he’ll hold hearings that might help Trump
U. S. Sen. Lindsey Graham is preparing to make good on his year-long promise to fully investigate the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump campaign associates — but he won’t force President Barack Obama to deliver testimony.
The South Carolina Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is resisting mounting pressure from President Donald Trump to haul in the former Democratic president to Capitol Hill to discuss whether he authorized the FBI to spy on Trump’s ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, saying that it would create a dangerous precedent.
“We have the sitting president (Trump) accusing the former president (Obama) of being part of a treasonous conspiracy to undermine his presidency,” Graham said in a statement Thursday. “We have the former president suggesting the current president is destroying the rule of law by dismissing the General Flynn case. All of this is occurring during a major pandemic.
“As to the Judiciary Committee, both presidents are welcome to come before the committee and share their concerns about each other,” he continued. “If nothing else it would make for great television. However, I have great doubts about whether it would be wise for the country.”
Flynn has reentered the news this week after the Department of Justice announced it would drop perjury charges against him — to the outrage of Democrats — while federal prosecutors made clear they would continue to seek a verdict in the case.
Flynn had previously pleaded guilty twice to lying under oath about his conversations with Russian officials during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which were uncovered as part of an Obama-era surveillance initiative aimed at determining the extent of Russian attempts to influence the election’s outcome.
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans released the names of the Obama administration officials who may have asked the intelligence community to reveal the identities of, or “unmask,” the Americans found to be communicating with Russian officials, which led to Flynn’s identity being revealed and his ouster from the Trump White House in early 2017.
Republican senators named Vice President Joe Biden, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, as someone potentially involved in the “unmasking.”
In a nod to this latest controversy, Graham on Thursday laid out a three-phase hearing schedule, “starting in early June,” that would kick off with an investigation into “the government’s decision to dismiss the Flynn case as well as an in-depth analysis of the unmasking requests made by the Obama administration officials against General Flynn.”
The second hearing, Graham said, would return to his original area of concern with the Obama Justice Department: whether it improperly secured a warrant to wiretap another Trump campaign associate, Carter Page, working off suspicions from opposition research that had at one point been partly financed by the Democratic National Committee.
Finally, Graham said, the Judiciary Committee would “look at whether Robert Mueller should have ever been appointed as Special Counsel” to investigate potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Graham’s plans for the committee in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus public health crisis is sure to infuriate Democrats, who are already criticizing Republican leadership for recalling the Senate back to Washington, D.C., to conduct legislative business having little or nothing to do with a federal response to the pandemic.
But Graham’s decision to dedicate some of the summer months to holding hearings that will likely be sympathetic to the president in an election year could earn him some goodwill among the conservative base.
Earlier in the day Thursday, Trump wrote on Twitter that it was time for Graham to stop being “Mr. Nice Guy.”
“If I were a Senator or Congressman, the first person I would call to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR, is former President Obama. He knew EVERYTHING,” Trump tweeted. “Do it @LindseyGrahamSC, just do it. No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more talk!”
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 3:13 PM.
