Former Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham has argued that the Trump-FBI report shows that the press is broken
US Senator Lindsey Graham speaks in a committee hearing last week in Washington. © Getty Images / Win McNamee
Monday’s bombshell Durham Report shows not only that the FBI improperly launched the ‘Russiagate’ probe to prevent Donald Trump from being elected president, but also that legacy media outlets won accolades for hyping the false scandal with politically motivated lies, US Senator Lindsey Graham has claimed.
“What have we learned from the Durham Report? That the New York Times and Washington Post were given a Pulitzer Prize for writing a bunch of politically motivated crap,” Graham said on Tuesday in a Fox News interview. “When it comes to reporting on Donald Trump, the mainstream media is dead.”
Graham, a South Carolina Republican, argued that the media outlets should give back their awards because the entire Russiagate episode was based on falsehoods and an anti-Trump political agenda. The 300-page report released on Monday by US special counsel John Durham found that the FBI didn’t have adequate evidence to justify its so-called ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation and didn’t bother to corroborate suspect information provided by Trump’s political enemies.
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Graham said Durham’s findings were “devastating and damning to the rule of law in America,” but legacy media outlets and Democratic Party leaders have declined to take it seriously. He called on US Attorney General and FBI director Christopher Wray to apologize to the people whose lives were ruined by Crossfire Hurricane.
“Wouldn’t it be nice for the agency to apologize to those that their lives were ruined?” Graham asked. “Wouldn’t it be nice for Garland to pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you’? Wouldn’t it be nice for the press to admit, ‘We got it wrong’. None of that’s going to happen.”
Instead, the senator said, Republicans will get angry, and millions of Americans will doubt the integrity of the US justice system. “This is generational damage to the FBI,” said Graham, who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential election. “It’s going to be hard to convince anybody who’s a conservative or middle-of-the-road person that the FBI’s on the up and up, particularly if they’ve still got their thumb on the scale regarding the Hunter Biden investigation.”
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Democrats and media outlets are marginalizing the Durham Report because “they just want to get Trump, and they don’t give a damn how you do it,” Graham said. He added that the Trump associates who were harmed by Crossfire Hurricane should “sue the hell” out of federal law enforcement authorities.
“Someone needs to be held accountable for using the law as a political weapon and ruining innocent peoples’ lives.”
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