Fox News "Hannity" - Transcript Interview with Lindsey Graham

Interview

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Here with reaction, Senator Lindsey Graham.

You look at the timeline, they knew in August of 2016, reconfirmed in January of 2017, and Comey signed the first one in October of 2016 but told Trump it was salacious and unverified, but on the FISA application said verified.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, R-S.C., SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Well, the main thing is in January of 2017, they found the Russian sub-source who is not based in Russia. He was a Steele employee here in America, used to work for the Brookings Institute. And in January and March of 2017, he basically told the FBI that the dossier is a bunch of bar talk, hearsay, never corroborated, take it all with a grain of salt and they continue to use it against Carter Page to get a warrant in April and June.

But here's what we found: Horowitz found this, not me. Horowitz came up to me during a briefing about the Carter Page fiasco and said, we found something you need to look at. Somebody in the Horowitz world (ph), an investigator, found a briefing paper prepared by the FBI in 2018 to brief the Senate Intel Committee. Apparently, somebody on the Intel Committee and the Senate wanted to be briefed about reliability of the sub-source. We found that briefing paper and they told the Senate Intel Committee the same story they told the FISA court. They did not tell them the truth about the Russian sub-source disavowing the dossier.

And I want Christopher Wray to account for how that happened. This happened on Wray's watch. On Wray's watch, the Senate Intel Committee was briefed about the dossier and the Russian sub-source in the same fashion that the FISA court was briefed, very misleading.

HANNITY: That's called premeditated fraud against the FISA court, words that this audience is familiar with because I use the same language on what they did.

GRAHAM: Yes.

HANNITY: Let me be very clear here. So, what you're saying is that the FBI knew early on that this was bogus. It was not only not confirmed or as they say at the top of the FISA warrant, you know, again this was the bulk of information for the FISA warrant verified, it was unverifiable and they knew it to be false. But they kept going with it anyway, which meant they drag the country through hell knowing it was B.S.

Why are they being held accountable, Senator?

GRAHAM: Yeah.

HANNITY: And, Director Wray, why isn't he -- why isn't he cleaning up the premier law enforcement agency in the world?

GRAHAM: So, let's put a fine point on what you just said.

How could it be that in February and March of 2018, over a year after the FBI interviewed the Russian sub-source saying the dossier was garbage that the FBI briefed the Senate Intel Committee in 2018 saying basically it's a reliable document?

Who put that briefing together? Christopher Wray needs to tell me how that briefing was set up for the Senate Intel Committee. I want to know who gave the briefing. I want to know who prepared the briefing memo. The briefing memo was a complete fabrication --

HANNITY: Well, Senator, that's called --

GRAHM: -- of what the sub-source said.

HANNITY: That's called -- that's called the process crime. Didn't they have predawn raids for Paul Manafort and Roger Stone for process crimes and lying to Congress? And didn't we already have a referral for these guys lying to Congress?

GRAHAM: This is really unbelievable, the double standards here by the media, but what I'm tell your listeners that a year after they knew the Russian dossier was no longer reliable, they told the same lies to Congress, not just the court, as a completely new front of legal liability and I'm going to find out what happened.

HANNITY: Well, that's why your testimony from Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates is key. Knowing what they know now, neither of them would've signed those warrants.

Great work, Senator Graham. Thank you.

GRAHAM: You got it.

HANNITY: Straight ahead.

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