Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham joins ‘Sunday Morning Futures.’
Mr. Chairman it’s always a pleasure. Thanks for being here.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): Thank you. Thank you.
BARTIROMO: So, first, before we get to the Supreme Court and your proceedings…
GRAHAM: Right.
BARTIROMO: … your reaction to the breaking news this morning that I have reported from my sources that we will not hear anything from John Durham before November 3 and the election?
GRAHAM: Well, I don’t know. I have never talked to Mr. Durham.
I think he’s a very capable, fair-minded prosecutor. But every time you look under one rock, you find something new. We have found in the last two or three days that the Russian subsource was actually suspected by the FBI of being a Russian spy all the way back to 2009.
They never told the FISA court that. I will be shocked if nobody’s charged with a crime at the FBI, the Department of Justice for misleading the FISA court. The FISA application given to the FISA court completely misrepresented the subsource, who he was and what he said.
And all of exculpatory information collected was never given to the court. That’s a breach of duty by the DOJ and the FBI to the court. So I will be shocked if nobody is not charged with some kind of crime in defrauding the court. But that’s up to Mr. Durham.
BARTIROMO: All right, I want to get back to this.
I want to ask you about your upcoming testimony you’re going to be getting from James Comey on Wednesday and also what else is in the books.
GRAHAM: Yes.
BARTIROMO: But let me first ask you about Amy Coney Barrett.
GRAHAM: OK.
BARTIROMO: What is your timeline, sir, in terms of the next moves, a confirmation process? What goes through the Supreme Court nomination?
GRAHAM: So, we will start on October the 12th. And more than half of the Supreme Court justices who have had hearings were done within 16 days or less. So, we will start on the 12th of October.
We will have a day of introduction. We will have two days of questioning, Tuesday and Wednesday, and, on the 15th, we will begin the markup. We will hold it over for a week, and we will report her nomination out of the committee on October 22.
Then it will be up to Senator McConnell as to what to do with the nomination once it comes out of committee.
BARTIROMO: So, McConnell has to schedule a floor vote, then, in order to actually get the confirmation before the election?
GRAHAM: Yes, but I will give him the nomination through the committee. We will have a full, fair hearing.
And let me say this. Democrats try to destroy Judge Barrett at their own peril. Their base is going nuts. They have raised $300 million — ActBlue has — since the passing of Justice Ginsburg.
I’m being outraised 2-1. Every Republican running in the Senate is being hit hard with all of this money coming from ActBlue. So, if you want to help me, LindseyGraham.com. Five or 10 bucks goes a long way.
But the money shows the energy. And every Democratic senator is going to be under tremendous pressure to destroy Judge Barrett. And they do so at their own peril. I think the American people will not tolerate this fine nominee to be mistreated like Justice Kavanaugh was.
BARTIROMO: So, that’s what I was going to say. Are you expecting the kind of fight that we saw over Judge Kavanaugh?
GRAHAM: I don’t know.
BARTIROMO: I remember Senator — then Senator Kamala Harris was among those poking back, yes, at Brett Kavanaugh.
GRAHAM: Yes.
So, Maria, the pressure on these people on the Democratic side is enormous. Look at what they’re saying about President Trump. Look at what they’re saying about Judge Barrett. She’s an incredibly capable, well-qualified judicial nominee, somebody you would expect the Republicans to nominate to the court.
The storylines about her religion are already starting. The one thing I can tell every American, we have a constitutional provision that prevents your religious choice being used against you if you’re nominated to the Supreme Court or any other position in the government. And that’s a good thing.
So, I don’t know where it’s going to go. But I know the amount of money coming in since the death of Justice Ginsburg tells me there’s a lot of energy and there to take out Judge Barrett.
Help me and others, LindseyGraham.com. I hate to keep saying that, but just — the money is just overwhelming.
The bottom line here is, they’re under a tremendous amount of pressure.
But, after Kavanaugh — let me say this.
BARTIROMO: Yes.
GRAHAM: After Kavanaugh, they try to destroy Judge Barrett at their own peril.
BARTIROMO: All right, let me move on to your upcoming testimony that you’re going to get from Jim Comey. You’re going to hear from Comey in a public hearing on Wednesday.
Look, I have got to ask you right out, Senator. Is this — I mean, look, he can just, in a public hearing, say: I can’t talk about that. That’s confidential. That’s classified.
(LAUGHTER)
GRAHAM: Yes.
BARTIROMO: So, sometimes, I look at public hearings and say, this just a sham.
Is it? Are you really going to solicit information from Jim Comey Wednesday?
GRAHAM: Yes.
Well, he can’t say that something is classified when it’s been declassified.
The information we received from Barr and Christopher Wray — and Attorney General Barr and Director Wray have been very helpful to me to get information out of the system. Durham had the first look at the fact that the primary subsource was suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent.
Yes, I’m going to ask Jim Comey, did you know that the man who put the dossier together for Christopher Steele was a suspected Russian spy on the payroll of the Democratic Party? If you knew that, why didn’t you tell the court? Did you know that the Russian subsource was interviewed by your own agents in January and March of 2017, and he disavowed the dossier as being reliable bar talk and hearsay?
And, if you knew that, why didn’t you tell the court? Because, in April of 2017 you signed a warrant where none of this was in there.
I’m going to ask him that. And I don’t know. There’s nothing classified about that. That’s in the Horowitz report.
BARTIROMO: There’s also breaking news in terms of who else you got to agree to come speak with you.
GRAHAM: Right.
BARTIROMO: Tell me who else you’re expecting.
GRAHAM: The number two, McCabe, is coming on October the 6th. I’m very glad he is.
I’m negotiating with Strzok. I want to bring in Mr. Barnett, the man who said there was no there there in the Flynn case. Mr. Barnett was the agent in charge in investigating General Flynn for any suspected ties to Russia.
On January the 4th, he did a memo wanting to close out the case, saying they found no evidence that General Flynn was working with the Russians in any fashion. It was January 5, meeting in the White House, where they kept the case going.
And what did Mr. Barnett say? That it seems to me they were out to get Trump, that there was no there there. They kept pushing the Flynn case, in spite of the evidence.
What’s the pattern here? Every time there was exculpatory evidence regarding the Carter Page warrant, they hid it or they altered it. They never told the court that the dossier wasn’t reliable. They knew it wasn’t reliable. They kept using it.
They weren’t searching for the truth. They were trying to get an outcome. When you look at what Mr. Barnett says, and the way they defrauded the FISA court, you get a clearer picture that these people are on a mission to go after Trump, not to find the truth.
I think it’s clear as day. And the mainstream media is ignoring this. Can you imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, that if the Republicans had done this?
(CROSSTALK)
GRAHAM: So, Maria, there’s a day of reckoning coming. Just stay tuned.
And there’s more coming.
BARTIROMO: OK.
GRAHAM: There’s a — there’s something else coming, more damming than this, believe it or not.
BARTIROMO: So, you are awaiting for a further declassification of evidence this upcoming week that is in fact more damming than what we’re talking about this morning?
GRAHAM: Well, all I can say is that there’s — so, what have we learned?
Everything Russia-Trump was looked at. You had $25 million, 60 agents. You had subpoenas. You had people’s lives turned upside down. The question is, did they look at Russia coming after Trump?
We have got a Russian spy on the payroll of the Democratic Party putting together a document that details the FBI is not reliable, and the FBI uses it four times to get a warrant against an American citizen, a member of the Trump team.
What accounts for that? There’s got to be — it’s clear to anybody who is looking they were — they wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to Trump. They were out to get the man.
BARTIROMO: All right, so you are questioning whether or not the Mueller investigation was appropriate as well.
You are also looking at the fraud against the FISA court…
GRAHAM: Yes.
BARTIROMO: … perhaps even worse than we know.
GRAHAM: Yes.
BARTIROMO: And you say that the Flynn case is also questionable, based on what we know today.
Even though we are likely not getting anything from John Durham before Election Day, you believe you will have more declassifications to educate the public on what went down in 2016, Senator?
GRAHAM: Yes, stay tuned.
So, there’s three buckets here. Was there any legitimate reason for Mueller to be investigating the Trump team for a crime regarding Russia? In 2017, there was no evidence that anybody on the Trump campaign was working with the Russians.
BARTIROMO: OK.
GRAHAM: The FISA abuse is another lane that we’re all looking at.
The court was misled, lied to. The FBI lied its ass off to the FISA court. I hope somebody goes to jail and gets fired.
And the third bucket is the Flynn case. They screwed General Flynn.
BARTIROMO: Right.
GRAHAM: There was no there there. And the top leadership of DOJ and the FBI kept pushing.
And now you have got an agent in — Barnett, in charge of the case, a front-line agent…
BARTIROMO: All right, Senator.
GRAHAM: … saying this was wrong.
