South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham blocked a unanimous vote to make special counsel Bob Mueller’s report public. Graham said he would approve the bill if a new special counsel was appointed to investigate Hillary Clinton.
The House voted 420-0 on a resolution demanding that Mueller’s report be made public after new Attorney General Bill Barr said he would only release a summary of the findings. The resolution cannot actually force Barr to actually release the report and is more symbolic than anything.
Hours after the House unanimously passed the bill, Graham took to the Senate floor to file an amendment demanding Barr appoint a new special counsel to investigate “misconduct” in the Justice Department over the Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“Any American out there who did what Secretary Clinton did, you'd be in jail now,” Graham claimed, despite the FBI repeatedly finding no evidence of criminality in their extensive investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server. “The question I want to know is, does anybody other than me believe that?”
“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,” he continued. “If the shoe were on the other foot. All hell would pay.”
Dems blast Graham:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer slammed Graham’s blatant attempt to block a nonbinding resolution that everyone else in the chamber appears to support.
“This amendment appears to be a pretext for blocking this very simple, noncontroversial resolution,” said Schumer. “I have absolutely no idea why a member of this body would object to this basic level of transparency whatever their concern on other issues.”
Republicans are very much on board with calling for the Mueller report to be made public.
“After taking nearly two years, costing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and providing limited public information about its scope," Steve Scalise, the second-ranking Republican in the House, told The Washington Post. "I am especially concerned about what would happen if the report was not made available to Congress.”
