Fox News "Hannity" - Transcript Interview with Lindsey Graham

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Joining me now for reaction, senator from the great state of South Carolina, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham.

Welcome to you, Senator. How are you?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): You're doing great. It's not as easy as it looks. It's that you're doing really good.

I'm doing good. Trey, it's a good day for the rule of law.

GOWDY: Yeah. You know, Senator, I was thinking on the way over here. Over the past four years, there have been more FBI employees indicted than there have been Trump family members. What does that say about what this country has been through over the last four years?

GRAHAM: Well, there's a couple story lines today. An FBI lawyer in charge of reviewing warrants is going to plead guilty to falsifying documents to the FISA court against a Trump advisor, and if you are lucky, you'll find this in the mainstream media for 30 seconds.

Can you imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and the FBI lawyer pled guilty today to falsifying documents against Hillary Clinton's advisors, it would be front page news. So, that's the world in which we live in.

But I want to applaud Mr. Horowitz, the inspector general -- without him, we wouldn't have known this.

And what this lawyer did is a really big deal. We have to trust the system. There's got to be a certain amount of trust. This is a lawyer, a man of the law, a member of the bar, who took it upon himself to falsify documents and to keep an investigation going that should have been stopped.

Now, the media can't figure out why. Why? They hated Trump's guts.

So this is a big day for the rule of law. And something tells me that Mr. Clinesmith knows where the bodies are buried, and if I were in the FBI working on Crossfire Hurricane, I'd be very worried right now.

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GOWDY: Speaking of working for the FBI and being worried, you were concerned that the FBI maybe had misled the Senate Intelligence Committee. Can you update us on that? What you have learned and what you're working on?

GRAHAM: This is a big day for transparency and the rule of law. So, Mr. Horowitz -- it's not in his report, Trey, but he found a briefing document dated sometime in February 2018 that was prepared by the FBI because the Senate Intel Committee -- used to be on the House Intel Committee, had real concerns about the Russian sub-source. So, they asked the FBI to come in and brief them.

So, I asked Director Wray, who did the briefing? Well, it's Bill Priestap. Who's this guy? He's one of the leaders of Crossfire Hurricane.

A year after the sub-source told the FBI in 2017, there's no -- there is zero corroboration for the dossier, I wouldn't trust it with, you know, a solid grain of salt, hearsay, bar talk. They knew for over a year.

And now, you've got Bill Priestap on February 15th, 2018, with four other people from the FBI, briefing this Senate Intel Committee, completely whitewashing the truth about the reliability of the dossier.

Now, Director Wray has been really good. He's given me the information. More is going to follow.

But what I want to do with this is turn it over to Durham because I think the briefing in 2018, a year after the sub-source told the FBI the dossier was a bunch of garbage, whitewashing that report at the Senate Intel Committee is potentially another crime. So, I'm going to send all this to Durham when I get it.

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GOWDY: Senator, the American people are watching Democrats and mayors of liberal and progressive cities complain about state and local police misconduct. Where is the outrage among Democrats when you have police misconduct over an entity they actually have power over, control over, which is the FBI?

Why is there not more bipartisan outrage over the last four years?

GRAHAM: To my Judiciary Committee Democrats -- this is about the rule of law. Many of you have been U.S. attorneys.

What we have here is an FBI lawyer falsifying documents to the FISA court to keep an investigation going that should have stopped, falsifying documents to get a warrant against an American citizen, part of a presidential campaign.

We now have in 2018, a year after sub-source told the FBI it was a bunch of garbage, the dossier, an effort by the FBI to lie to Congress and the reason Priestap lied to the Congress is if he told the Congress the truth about what the sub-source told the FBI, he would expose the lie to the court. So, Mr. Horowitz deserves a lot of credit here.

Where is this thing going? The next thing I'm going to do, Trey, is I'm going to call to the committee and interview the case agent and the intel analyst who interviewed the Russian sub-source in January and March of 2017 and they got memos showing that it was a bunch of garbage, the guide denied the reliability of the dossier, it's bar talk, it was hearsay, it's zero corroboration.

And here's a simple question: the most high-profile case may be ever in the history of the FBI, the document needed to get a warrant against Carter Page, completely fell apart in terms of reliability. Who did you tell? What's the likelihood that the people who interviewed the Russian sub- source did not tell McCabe, who's riding herd on the investigation, eventually Comey, oh, by the way, our case fell apart?

That's where I'm headed. If they knew about this interview, if they got a warrant in April or June, months after the interview, they should go to jail.

GOWDY: Senator, let me ask you quickly, we got about 20 seconds, what is the future, if any, of FISA?

GRAHAM: It's hanging in the balance because people abuse power and God knows we need it because the terrorists are coming after us, and we've got to rehabilitate the system. The only way people are going to trust the FBI and FISA in the future is for people who lied, cheated, and manipulated to be fired and go to jail.

Stay tuned.

GOWDY: Well, thank you for staying up late with us tonight. I know it's past your bedtime. Thank you, Senator Graham.

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