Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said President Donald Trump could be “the first president in history to go down because you can’t stop inappropriately talking about an investigation.”
Partial transcript as follows:
DICKERSON: Let me ask you.The president was called a liar by Mr. Comey. The president today has called Mr. Comey a coward. Where are we with this?
GRAHAM: More like a wrestling match than anything else.Here is what I would say. The president got elected by being a fighter, a disrupter. People wanted him to come to Washington and change the place, turn it upside down.
I have gotten to know the president better. I like him. He has got a good agenda. But here is the question. Can you be a street fighter on all things all the time and still be a good president?
My advice to the president is every day you are talking about Jim Comey and not the American people and their needs and their desires, their hopes and their dreams, you are making a mistake.
DICKERSON: Is he getting in the way of his own agenda?
GRAHAM: Yes, totally. At the end, he has got a good agenda. But this does get in the way of it. So, the hearing was pretty good. No collusion with the Russians yet. I don’t think obstruction of justice exists here.
But every time you tweet about Comey, it is almost like wait for the next wrestling match between Comey and Trump. It should be about what can Donald Trump do to help the lives of American people and sort of get out of the way here.
DICKERSON: Do you think the president was vindicated? He thought he was vindicated…
(CROSSTALK)
GRAHAM: Well, I think it was true that he is not under investigation for colluding with the Russians. And I don’t think what was said amounts to obstruction of justice.
Now, what the president did was inappropriate. But here is what is so frustrating for Republicans like me. You may be the first president in history to go down because you can’t stop inappropriately talking about an investigation that, if you just were quiet, would clear you.
It is frustrating for me to want to help a man who I think will do big things no other Republican will do, like immigration. Believe it or not, I think Donald Trump may deliver us from a broken immigration system. This is not helping.
But this should be in the Judiciary Committee. I heard Dianne Feinstein on a show earlier today. You had Comey suggest that the current U.S. attorney general and the former attorney general were playing politics with the investigation, Lynch and Sessions. That needs to be in our committee.
Let me tell this to the American people. If the attorney general’s office has become a political office, that is bad for us all. So I want to get to the bottom of that, and it should be in Judiciary.
(h/t The Hill)
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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