Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday forced Senator Lindsey Graham to watch a 1998 clip of himself talking about the dangers of ignoring subpoenas from Congress during an era when he was leading the impeachment effort against former President Bill Clinton.
During Graham’s appearance on Fox News Sunday earlier today, Wallace challenged the Republican senator on his past comments about impeachment, which appears to contradict his current stance on calls by Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump.
"You call all of what’s going on in Washington a political circus, but you took a different view back when you were leading the impeachment effort against Clinton back in the late '90s. At that time, you said that any president, and you talked specifically about Clinton and Richard Nixon, who defied Congress when it came to subpoenas was in danger of impeachment,” Wallace said, before airing an old clip of Graham’s comments made in Capitol Hill.
“You’re becoming the judge and jury. It is not your job to tell us what we need. It is your job to comply with the things we need to provide oversight over you,” Graham can be seen saying in the December 18, 1998 clip. At the time, he was a member of the House of Representatives and one of the managers — de facto prosecutors — in Clinton's impeachment trial before the Senate.
“Question: Why is it an impeachable offense for Clinton or Nixon back then to ignore congressional subpoenas but it’s okay for President Trump to do now?” the host asked Graham.
"Well, there’s two things here," Graham explained. "[Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s investigation was a special counsel appointed to find out if the president committed a crime; if he colluded with the Russians; if he obstructed justice. The president gave 1.4 million documents to Muller. Everybody around the president was allowed to testify. He never claimed executive privilege. He complied, no cover-up, worked with Mueller. Mueller’s the final word on this for me."
"If Clinton had stiffed Ken Starr, that’s different," the Republican senator continued. "What [Democratic House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold] Nadler is doing is trying to destroy the president and his family. If I were the president, I would fight back against this political revenge coming out of the House.”
“Mueller was the man of the law. Mueller was an independent voice that we all trusted to be fair. I don’t trust House Democrats to be fair. They’re trying to redo the Mueller report, they’re trying to make up other stuff and at the end of the day, it will be political suicide for them to impeach,” he added.
He knows he's making no sense. But he knows he doesn't have to. The GOP argument comes down to a simple "They're out to get our Dear Leader!!" and it's extending beyond the absurd FBI "spygate" (which they weirdly never deployed before the election) to this news angle which has the Democratic House is simply seeking "revenge" by doing what any normal congress would be expected to do in this situation.
Graham says Mueller is the final word on this and Mueller didn't say if Trump had obstructed justice because of the DOJ policy that he couldn't be indicted. In other words, he saw his mission as gathering evidence and only stating a conclusion that the president had not committed a specific crime --- something he was unable to do in the obstruction case --- and leaving the evidence for the congress (or other prosecutors once the president was out of office) to follow up on. Graham understands this, he's just lying.
As for his weird statement that "if Clinton had stiffed Ken Starr, that's different, it literally makes no sense. Clinton was accused of exactly the sort of cover-up that Trump is accused of, except that in Clinton's case it was over some trivial personal nonsense and in Trump's case it's attempting to stop an investigation into a foreign assault on the United States electoral system.
And yes, he understands that too.
This situation is a test of character for everyone and the Republicans nearly across the board are failing it so badly that it's hard to see how we can ever have a functioning government with any of them still in it. How could anyone think they will ever act in good faith again? On anything? After all, if they were this willing to sell out their own beliefs, much less the security of the nation, they cannot ever be trusted to care more about the nation than their own political power. We've always known this on some level. Now the truth is unavoidable.