Graham holds impeachment hostage: we’ll ignore it unless whistleblower is exposed
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been hanging around Donald Trump way too much for his own good.
Here is a man with a perfectly good law degree who, as a 25-year veteran of Congress, presumably has a working knowledge of the U.S. Constitution by now.
Yet, enthralled by whatever magic spell cast over him by Donald Trump — or incriminating kompromat, if you choose to believe the whispered speculation of those who find Graham’s sudden transformation into one of the president’s most fervent defenders oddly suspicious — the senator now feels free to go on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News program and offer his own unique interpretation of the Constitution’s impeachment process.
While the Senate will not even be involved in the impeachment of the president until after the House of Representatives has completed its investigation of Trump and compiled and voted upon articles of impeachment laying out the charges and the evidence underlying those charges against him, Senator Graham doesn’t seem to understand the role of the Senate as an impartial jury that will need to hear the evidence and make the final decision on whether or not to remove the president from office.
Instead, Senator Graham already seems to have prejudged the outcome of the trial phase of the impeachment in favor of the president.
One clue to his closed mind on the subject was his insistence last week that he wouldn’t even read the transcripts of the testimony given by witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry hearings.
He gave another clue today while speaking with Fox News’ Bartiromo, stating that, unless the identity of the whistleblower who brought Trump’s corrupt and self-serving extortion of Ukraine to public attention was revealed, he would consider any impeachment referral from the House of Representatives to be “invalid.”
Even more outrageously, Senator Graham claimed — without any basis in the text of the Constitution — that the Senate had no obligation to conduct an impeachment trial if the House referral is deemed invalid. He made the claim without specifying exactly who would be determining the validity of the referral.
“I consider any impeachment in the House that doesn’t allow us to know who the whistleblower is to be invalid,” Graham pontificated. “Because without the whistleblower complaint, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this.”
Well, praise be the whistleblower then! Especially since virtually everything that the whistleblower has alleged in his duly reported complaint through the proper official channels of the intelligence community’s inspector general’s office has been subsequently verified by the testimony of other administration officials in their sworn testimony before the House impeachment inquiry committee.
“I also see the need for Hunter Biden to be called to adequately defend the president,” Graham added. “And if you don’t do those two things, it’s a complete joke.”
At this point, it’s obvious that Senator Graham sees his role not as an impartial juror examining the evidence uncovered and rightfully forwarded for prosecution by the elected representatives of America’s citizens in the House but as a spokesperson for the president who appears on cable news shows to parrot Trump’s distractive lies designed to take attention away from the corruption, illegal extortion, and self-dealing of his administration.
That Senator Graham is willing to rewrite the Constitution in his own mind to include conditional provisions on impeachment that don’t actually exist shows the level of desperation that the Republicans are sinking to in order to maintain their own power — despite the clear signs of criminality far beyond anything this nation has ever seen before.
You can watch a video clip of Senator Graham speaking on Fox News in the excerpt below.
.@SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo Thread.@LindseyGrahamSC says any impeachment that doesn’t call the whistleblower to testify will be dead on arrival in the Senate. pic.twitter.com/FbC6yxPPPl
— The “Dirty” Truth (@AKA_RealDirty) November 10, 2019
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Original reporting by David Edwards at RawStory.
