Robert Mueller Memo
Floor Speech
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Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I will try to be very brief as far as where I am coming from here.
We were told that Mueller may be imminently fired. The President said some things that were at times disturbing about the investigation. I was asked many times, let's make sure we protect Mueller and let him do his job. So I first introduced the Special Counsel Independence Protection Act on August 3, 2017, with Republicans and Democrats.
To my good friend from New York, I think Mueller is just about done.
To all those who are worried about Mueller not being able to do his job, he has. He is about to tell us what he found.
There is a regulation that determines what is disclosed and how it is disclosed. I have all the confidence that Mr. Barr will be as transparent as possible. That regulation is specific. You can look at it for yourself. I would like to know as much as possible and share it with the public. However, I have also been consistent in trying to find balance here.
In February of 2018, I called for a special counsel to look at the abuses, potentially, by the Department of Justice and the FBI regarding the Clinton email investigation and the handling of the FISA warrant process against Mr. Carter Page, someone associated with the Trump campaign.
So since 2018, I have asked a simple thing. If this stuff about Page and Strzok and Ohr doesn't bother you, then that bothers me. Were there two systems of justice in 2016--one for the Democratic candidate and one for the Republican candidate, where the Republican candidate's campaign had a FISA warrant issued against somebody associated with it based on a document that was known to be unreliable, politically charged, on four different occasions? That should bother every American.
Rather than my telling you whether it happened or not, why don't we appoint a Mueller-like figure to look at how the Clinton email investigation ended up the way it did, what the tarmac meeting was all about between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton?
I can quickly say to my colleagues, if the shoe were on the other foot, if the Republican Party hired a foreign agent to go to Russia to investigate dirt on Hillary Clinton, gave it to the Justice Department, and it was used on four separate occasions to get a warrant against somebody working with or associated with the Clinton campaign, all hell would pay.
If a member of the Justice Department told the investigators: Before you get the warrant, the person who is involved in collecting this information hates Clinton; if there were exchanges between an FBI agent and a Department of Justice lawyer talking about getting an insurance policy to make sure that Hillary Clinton is never elected and how much they hated Trump, it would be front-page news all over the world.
I don't know what happened between Trump and Russia, but we are about to find out, and we will see if there is something there, and we will use a process to disclose it to the public.
But I ask the Democratic leader to modify his request and allow my amendment at the desk to make a simple change--and every Republican will be with me, if you wonder about how Republicans vote in the House--that this resolution be modified calling for the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel to investigate Department of Justice misconduct in the handling of the Clinton email investigation and in the handling of the FISA warrant process as it relates to warrants obtained on Carter Page and to publicly release the results of those investigations--be agreed to consistent with law. I ask that the resolution to be modified in accordance with this.
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Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I thank Senator Schumer. I appreciate getting this done quickly.
I will just say, there are a lot of Americans, including Jim Jordan, who believe that what happened in 2016 with the Clinton email investigation and the FISA warrant against Carter Page showed corruption at the highest level of the government. I agree that there are more than smoking guns here. There is overwhelming evidence that somebody outside the political system should look into. I can't find anybody much on the other side who seems to give a damn about that.
Mueller, I get. Mueller has been allowed to do his job. We are going to find out what he found pretty soon, as much as we can, consistent with the law. But I am not going to give up on the idea that we are just going to look at one problem of 2016. I have been talking to myself for the most part; now I have a forum.
I will introduce a resolution asking you to do a simple thing. Ask somebody outside of politics--a special counsel--to look into how in the world the system got so off track, to use a document prepared by foreign agent, paid for by the Democratic Party, collected in Russia, to obtain a warrant against an American citizen that is garbage to this day? How in the world could the investigation get so off track that the two people in charge of it openly talked about making sure that there was an insurance policy against Trump if he won and openly espoused support for Clinton. How do you interview Clinton the way she was interviewed? Any American out there who did what Secretary Clinton did you would see in jail now.
The question I want to know is, Does anybody other than me believe that? I don't ask you to believe me. We let Mueller look at all things Trump related to collusion and otherwise. Somebody needs to look at what happened on the other side and find out if the FBI and the DOJ had two systems--one supporting the person they wanted to win and one out to get the person they wanted to lose.
Some of these people have been fired for lying, and it is now time to have a special counsel look at all things 2016, not just Trump.
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