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Graham blows Barr’s cover

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade last week “When I go to meet God at the pearly gates, I don’t think he’s going to ask me, ‘Why didn’t you convict Trump?'” He may be right about that but only because he’s likely to first be asked to explain what he did afterward. Graham has become Trump’s instrument of revenge in the Senate and he isn’t making any bones about it.

Appearing on Judge Jeanine Pirro’s Fox show on Saturday night, Graham made it clear that the president being impeached for coercing a foreign government to smear his opponent isn’t the end of that story. They’re just bringing their bag of dirty tricks back home where Trump partisans in the US Government can get the job done right.

Pirro asked Graham if they could expect the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees to take a look at the whistleblower and the Bidens and get to the bottom of this world-shaking conspiracy. Graham replied:

GRAHAM: So, we’re are not going to live in a world where as a Republican you get investigated from the day you get sworn in, three years later they are still coming after you. Here’s what amazes me. The Russian investigation. What happened? Half the people behind the Russian investigation are going to go to jail and Trump was cleared.

PIRRO: Hopefully.

GRAHAM: Well, just hang tight.

The people going to jail are all Trump associates and Trump was anything but cleared. But if you watch Fox you probably don’t know that.

Graham declared that he’s sending a list of witnesses to the Justice Department, including all the case agents who were involved in the Russia investigation, and that’s not all:

I don’t believe… I want to know what Obama knew about this investigation. I want to call Rosenstein, Sally Yates, Comey and McCabe, all the people who worked on this case to find out how it got so off the rails and make sure it never happens again. And I want to know who in the White House knew about this counter-intelligence investigation against the Republican nominee.

As I have noted before, Graham has been making these noises for a while Last weekend, as the final impeachment vote neared, he appeared on Fox and made a similar vow:

“We’ll deal with the whistleblower … we’ll deal with Joe Biden’s conflicts of interest. (The) Judiciary Committee will deal with all things FISA. Let me tell Republicans out there — you should expect us to do this. If we don’t we’re letting you down.”

He’s had a full year as Judiciary Chairman so you’d think he would have made his move by now. On the other hand, I suspect that he promised Trump he would follow through if Trump would give up the idea of witnesses so maybe he’s on the spot now.

On Sunday he appeared on Face the Nation and basically made the same promise with just a slightly smaller portion of right-wing red meat. But he added some details that were quite alarming.

Margaret Brennan asked Graham about the firing of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindeman and Graham was either egregiously misinformed or outrageously lying when he said that Vindeman had never been asked tough questions such as “did you leak to the whistleblower.” Of course, he was asked. Trump minion Jim Jordan, R-OH, asked him and Vindeman replied under oath, “I never did. I never would. It is preposterous that I would do that.”

And Graham sounds as paranoid as the looniest Q-Anon conspiracy theorist here:

But Graham may have revealed something much more important about the Biden issue when he said that he’d spoken with Attorney General William Barr on the subject just that morning and was assured that Barr had set up “a process “by which Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani could funnel information directly to the Department of Justice. What an interesting development, particularly since Barr has just issued an order saying that he must personally sign off on all investigations of political campaigns.

Graham said he was doing this out of concern that the Russian government was feeding Giuliani disinformation. But in the course of all that he blithely announced to the world that the DOJ is now involved in an investigation of Joe Biden — just as they had tried to get the president of Ukraine to do last summer.

Graham is all over the place, clearly unclear about the facts and just trying to appease the president.

I don’t think Trump is going to be appeased.

Trump tweeted before the Face the Nation appearance that Graham needs to get cracking with his Judiciary Committee saying “he must start up Judiciary and not stop until the job is done. Clean up D.C. now, last chance!” And then, this:

He wants his pound of flesh. He is determined to make Biden — and by extension Obama — pay.

Although it is looking more and more unlikely that Joe Biden will get the nomination, the Senate Republicans have also staked everything on being “right” about Biden being the most corrupt politician in America. They are now fully implicated in everything Trump has done and will do going forward. They are made men and made women.

And if there’s one thing we learned from the impeachment it’s that as much as people may try to circumvent his crazy schemes and ridiculous orders, if he wants it done there are people in his orbit who will do it. Now that there’s absolutely no oversight, he has no limits.

I can see what Graham may be trying to do. He’s more than willing to throw Joe Biden to the wolves and degrade every institution in America to keep Trump happy and assure his own re-election. But he is concerned that Trump is being manipulated by the Russian government through his henchman Rudy Giuliani and he thinks that he and Bill Barr can keep a lid on it. But Bill Barr has his own agenda and I’m not sure it’s the same one.

Trump has purged the party of anyone who would defy him and his White House is now only staffed by sycophants and assassins. It’s become commonplace to discuss siccing the Justice Department on political enemies:

Yes, they are all clowns, from Trump to Graham to McCarthy. But don’t take any consolation from that They are very powerful clowns and there is nothing to hold them back:

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” —Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”

That perfectly describes the Trump party.

Update:

Here it is:

My Salon column reprinted with permission

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