Saying he doesn’t make the statements lightly, Senator Lindsey Graham eviscerated the James Comey-led FBI for becoming “a criminal enterprise” in their efforts to investigate collusion between President Trump and Russia.
Graham was responding to an Inspector General report that chronicled numerous “significant inaccuracies and omissions” involving applications filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.
The report claimed the FBI demonstrated ‘no intentional misconduct or political bias’ – just perpetual incompetence to the coincidental detriment of the President’s campaign – in surveilling former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“I believe there will be no debate among reasonably minded people, particularly lawyers, about how the system got off the rails, but in my view became a criminal enterprise to defraud the FISA court,” Graham seethed, “to deny American citizen Carter Page his constitutional rights, and to continue an operation against President Trump as president of the United States.”
“These are statements I don’t make lightly.”
RELATED: IG Report Debunks Lies in Adam Schiff’s FISA Memo
Senator @LindseyGrahamSC on Justice Department IG Report: “The point I want to make is, let’s assume for a moment it started out okay, it sure as hell didn’t end okay.”
Full video here: https://t.co/cqcSFIDvpl pic.twitter.com/28mm15HBt3
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 9, 2019
Graham Enraged
The South Carolina Republican continued to cite the IG report in blasting the FBI for going back “to the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover,” accusing officials in the bureau of having “made stuff up.”
“If I was Mr. Carter Page, I’d hire me a lawyer and I’d sue the hell out of the United States,” Graham said.
He then summed up the resistance movement within the FBI in a nutshell.
“What they did from that point on, this whole endeavor became a criminal conspiracy to defraud the court, to trample on the rights of an American citizen, Mr. Carter Page,” Graham asserted, later adding, “If that doesn’t bother you, you hate Trump way too much.”
RELATED: Lindsey Graham Wants Obama Questioned Under Oath About Trump Campaign Investigation
@LindseyGrahamSC – @BarackObama should absolutely be questioned under oath about the counterintelligence investigation against the @realDonaldTrump campaign. pic.twitter.com/WpKlFyV90H
— Rusty Weiss ?? (@rustyweiss74) August 30, 2019
Dirty Cop Comey
The IG report did no favors for the already heavily tarnished reputation of then-FBI director James Comey.
Despite his denials to the contrary, the findings prove, as the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin writes, that “Comey is now revealed to be the dirtiest cop ever to run the FBI.”
“The damage done to the FBI’s credibility by the abuse of power under Comey will take years to repair,” he adds.
A report by the Inspector General in August also excoriated Comey for violating department policies and accusing him of setting “a dangerous example” when he leaked FBI memos to a friend, instructing them to turn the material over to a reporter.
That release made it very clear that Comey took such dangerous steps “in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”
Exactly what the leader of a criminal enterprise would do.