CBS "Face the Nation" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Lindsey Graham
Interview
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MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator, you voiced support for the Muller probe in the past. Listening to what McCabe just--
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Right.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --described there, a-- a troubling pattern of behavior that he as a-- a lifetime investigator saw as a-- a troubling fact pattern, led him to open a counterintelligence investigation into the President of the United States. Can you understand why he came to that conclusion?
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: I can understand that the American people will get an answer to the question for Mister Mueller. What I can't understand is why Mister McCabe would meet with Page and Strzok to discuss their hatred for President-- Candidate Trump, talking about taking an insurance policy out in case the election went different than they want. So Mueller will tell us about what Trump did or didn't do. I'm going to tell the country about McCabe and the people at the Department of Justice and how they behaved. Did they take the law in their own hands? Did they abuse the FISA warrant process because they had a political agenda? Did their hatred of Trump go so far that they abandoned their role of being law enforcement agents and become advocates for a political cause? We are going to get to the bottom of that.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you recognize there that McCabe is laying out the-- the grounds of what he saw as an obstruction of justice attempt.
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Mister Mueller will look at that but I think McCabe, Strzok, and Page had a political bias, a political agenda. And I find it odd that the dossier that we used to get the warrant against Carter Page--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: --prepared by a foreign agent, paid for by the Democratic Party that they knew to be unreliable, was used on four separate occasions to get a warrant. And I want to know why Comey told the President, "Here's the dossier. We've got it. We can't verify any of it. We want you to know about it." And that same document was used by the FBI and the Department of Justice under oath to tell the court, "This is reliable information, give us a warrant based on this document." I hope your viewers understand that the rule of law works both ways. Somebody has got to watch those who watch us and I intend to watch what McCabe and-- and his crowd did during the 2016 election.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The President just declared a national emergency in regard to getting the funds for his border wall.
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Yeah.
MARGARET BRENNAN: In terms of getting those funds though through this emergency action there's about three point six billion of it--
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Right.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --that could come from military construction efforts, including construction of a middle school in Kentucky, housing for military families, improvements for bases like Camp Pendleton and Hanscom Air Force Base. Aren't you concerned that some of these projects that were part of legislation that you helped approve in Congress are now going to possibly be cut out?
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, the President will have to make a decision where to get the money. Let's just say for a moment that he took some money out of the military construction budget. I would say it's better for the middle-school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border. We'll get them the school they need. But right now we've got a national emergency on our hands. Opioid addiction is going through the roof in this country. Thousands of Americans died last year or dying this year because we can't control the flow of drugs into this country and all of it's coming across the border.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Through ports of entry according to the--
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: So the dangers presented by a broken border to me.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --to Customs and Border patrol though. But--
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Both. It's both. It's not just one. For every-- for every one we get God knows how much we miss.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do-- don't you think Congress has ceded too much power to the executive branch? Do you think that you need to more sharply define what constitutes a national emergency so that future presidents can't interpret it as they like?
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Good question. I think that every member of Congress has watched three Presidents send troops to the border. Bush, Obama, now Trump. Not one of us have complained about deploying forces to the border to secure the border. It's pretty hard for me to understand the legal difference between sending troops and having them build a barrier. What disappoints me is on President Obama's watch as a Republican, I voted for a forty-four-billion-dollar border security package, nine billion of which included barriers.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm.
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Two thousand six all of us voted for the Secure Fre-- Fence Act. And we're talking about steel barriers not a concrete wall. And, unfortunately, when it comes to Trump, the Congress is locked down and will not give him what we've given past presidents. So, unfortunately, he's got to do it on his own and I support his decision to go that route.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, perhaps, in the future we can talk about sharpening what constitutes an emergency. But before I let you go you made a pitch from the stage--
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Right.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --there at Munich for foreign troops to be committed to Syria alongside American forces.
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Yeah.
MARGARET BRENNAN: How many U.S. forces are needed to stay there and has President Trump actually made that commitment to you?
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, that's-- thank you for asking, Margaret. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has been destroyed. It has been defeated. All the work is not yet done. Remnants of ISIS are lethal. We need a follow-on presence post caliphate destruction. The good news we can do this with a fraction of American forces we've had in Syria in the past. The real good news is Europeans are willing to contribute because their cities have been attacked from Syria. The caliphate in Syria--
MARGARET BRENNAN: How many U.S. troops?
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: --has caused thousands of deaths inside of Europe. I think just a fraction, a couple of hundred, compared to twenty-seven hundred would be enough to get Europeans to contribute to the stabilizing force to make sure ISIS doesn't come back like it did in Iraq, to make sure that Turkey and the Kurds don't go to war, to keep them apart, and to make sure Iran doesn't come in and take over when we leave. So, I've never felt better about the outcome in Syria with a small contingent of Americans. A lot of Europeans will come in and help fill in the gap, a very small down payment to secure ISIS never comes back. We've gone from thousands of troops in Iraq and Syria down now to a couple of hundred in Syria. Congratulations, Mister President. The job is not yet done but we've done a hell of a job destroying the caliphate.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Graham, thank you.
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