If you missed the Senate hearing on the IG report Wednesday morning, you missed something truly special.
Senator Graham gave a fiery assessment of the report, absolutely shredding the work done by the FBI for the obvious and blatant mistakes made in an attempt to help Democrats take out Trump.
Not Biased But…
While Democrats tried to spin the hearing throughout the day, Graham made it quite clear the hearing was only about one thing… the quality of the work done by the FBI.
He was complimentary of the investigative work by the Inspector General and his team and did not even try to disagree with his ultimate conclusion.
However, Graham did spotlight the lack of oversight by FBI leadership to make an outstanding case that the mistakes made were purposeful and politically motivated.
Now, while the report itself said there was no bias by the decision-makers that launched the investigation, they were apparently the only people that were not biased in this case.
What became clear throughout the day was that while the ultimate decision-makers may not have been biased, hence the ruling, the people that wrote the report were significantly biased.
To be fair, the IG stated he found information that had supporters on both sides, but the FISA warrants ONLY contained errors that would hurt Trump, not help him, so you make your own conclusions there.
Getting It All Started
The tone of the hearing was set right from the start when Graham gave an impassioned speech about the FISA warrant abuse shown by the FBI.
Even the IG had to admit he had never seen anything like it, which makes his overall conclusion even more baffling.
Graham made it clear that whether you like Trump or not is not the issue here. What is at stake, rather, is the abuses of the FBI to continue to keep an investigation open that should have been shut down at the early stages.
He stated, “My goal is when this is over, whether you like Trump, hate Trump, don’t care about Trump, you look at this as more than a few irregularities, because if this becomes a few irregularities in America, then God help us all.
“What’s been described as a few irregularities becomes a massive criminal conspiracy over time to defraud the FISA court, to illegally surveil an American citizen and keep an investigation open against a sitting president of the United States, violating every norm known to the rule of law.”
Here is his full opening statement…
Democrats did as much deflection as possible, with some, such as Senator Kamala Harris, not even asking relevant questions, but the end result was clear…
The FBI manipulated documents and purposely omitted evidence that more than likely would have given the FISA court no choice but to decline the warrant application.
Not only that but in the process, the FBI made it appear as though at least one Trump adviser was an agent of Russia rather than a former US operative providing information against Russia.
At the end of the day, it became very clear our FISA processes need to be significantly changed, with far more oversight, and James Comey is about to find himself in a LOT of legal trouble.