During Attorney General William Barr's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Chairman Lindsey Graham led the Republican defense of the embattled Department of Justice chief.
Graham echoed Barr's conclusions on special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and even attempted to shift the focus onto alleged wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.
The South Carolina senator continued his spirited defense of Barr after the hearing, appearing on Fox News to speak with host Sean Hannity. Even while Democratic calls for Barr's impeachment or resignation piled up, Graham assured Hannity that the attorney general was merely a victim of partisan politics.
"The reason they are mad at Barr and me is because they didn't get the outcome they want," Graham said. "My friends on the other side want out, and they don't care how they get it."
Democrats have accused Barr of misrepresenting Mueller's final report in an effort to protect the president, who nominated Barr to lead the DOJ in December. Mueller's report was submitted to the DOJ on March 22. Barr then released a four-page memo which he claimed summarized Mueller's findings, stating there was no evidence of conspiracy or coordination between President Donald Trump's campaign, its associates and Russia to influence the election.
The memo also suggested that Mueller did not draw a conclusion as to whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice. But on Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that Mueller wrote to Barr in March to complain that the attorney general's summary did not reflect the context, nature, and substance" of the investigation.
For Democrats, this meant Barr's assertion in an April hearing that he did "not know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusions" was a lie.
But Graham stressed multiple times on Wednesday that he had no interest in delving deeper into Mueller's findings. "We gave Mueller two years to do his job. He had 19 lawyers. He had $25 million and interviewed 500 people and issued 2,000 subpoenas. He had plenty of opportunity without interference," the senator told Hannity.
"There was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians at all. Mueller chose not to press forward on obstruction. I always thought obstruction argument was absurd. It is over," he continued.
Graham, once a staunch critic of Trump but now one of his most vocal allies, did not have a bad word to say about the attorney general. Rather, he claimed the circus surrounding the Mueller report was the fault of Democrats. "Bill Barr's a fine man, he'll sleep well tonight," he told Hannity. "His critics are the problem, not him."
And now that the Mueller investigation is "over," Graham plans to turn the tables on the opposition.
"I want the public to know that the FISA warrant obtained against Carter Page was based on garbage collected by foreign agent, paid for by the Democratic Party that is unverified to this day," he added, referring to the infamous Steele Dossier which suggested criminal and salacious behaviour by Trump and his associates.
"I want to find out did they open up a counterintelligence investigation against President Trump for bad motives, and we're going to get the answers to all those questions."
