Just before heading out to spend his weekend hitting the links with President Donald Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Friday broke with the President’s rhetoric surrounding revelations that an FBI informant met with members of the Trump campaign in 2016.
While Graham did not attend the classified meeting between lawmakers and intelligence officials about the informant who reportedly met with two Trump campaign officials as part of a broader counterintelligence operation to determine the scope of Russian meddling, he said he doesn’t agree with Trump labeling the informant a “spy.”
“A confidential informant is not a spy,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Friday morning. “I don’t know if there’s a reason to have a confidential informant following a campaign. But let’s put it this way. There needs to be some protocols in place if this ever happens again. Right now, there are rules saying you can’t, you know, you don’t want investigations to change political cycles. So there’s rules about, you know, ending and starting investigations because of the political cycle.”
When pressed further about whether Trump should be using the word “spygate” — his new monicker for the ordeal — Graham said “probably not, but I don’t know.”
“I didn’t go to the meeting,” he added. “I don’t think it’s — I don’t think he’s a spy. And I don’t know who this person was.”
Trump has seized on reports of the informant meeting with two officials on his campaign — Carter Page and George Papadopoulos — to further cement his claims of “deep state” within the Justice Department that he claims is determined to undermine him. He asked the Justice Department to investigate whether political motivations were involved in the decision to dispatch the informant.
This is a pretty obvious bit of semantics, but (1) what took somebody at Graham’s level so long to say it out loud and (2) why is he the only Republican politician to have said so to date?
Occam’s Razor suggests many unflattering reasons why…
Sounds like a pleasant way to spend a long weekend in HELL with Dump
Guess Kelly has the weekend off
All this talk of informants and people flipping makes me think some people think someone did something he shouldn’t have. Yet they don’t come out and say it.
Oh, Lindsey! Is that phony honor of yours popping up again? Just take another hit off the pipe with your rent boy and that will solve that problem.
And yes, I made a gay joke about that Republican piece of shit Lindsey Graham. So hire Alan Dershowitz and sue my ass.
Oh, and someone asked Donald Trump if he had ever read the epic poem “Beowulf”, to which he replied, “I liked the TV series better - you know, the one with David Hasselhoff and the female lifeguards with the big jugs.”
He’s going to have to ride on the back of the golf cart after that misstep.