Fox News "Sunday Morning Features" - Transcript Interview with Lindsey Graham

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

BARTIROMO: Joining me right now to talk more about that is Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham.

Mr. Chairman, it's great to have you once again. Thank you so much for being here.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): Thank you.

BARTIROMO: A big applaud goes to you for declassifying documents over the last week and really getting to the news and the truth.

Thank you, Senator, for doing that. I know that our audience is grateful.

GRAHAM: Thank you.

BARTIROMO: I want to talk about what you declassified.

And, certainly, you have articles in this from The New York Times, where we see Peter Strzok, FBI agent...

GRAHAM: Right.

BARTIROMO: ... marking off the articles, saying there is absolutely no evidence of this.

Tell us about the report that you declassified from the FBI which is based on an interview with the subsource of Christopher Steele.

GRAHAM: So, there's two things that we declassified so the public could understand how corrupt Crossfire Hurricane actually was.

Number one was a memo written by an intel analyst who spent three days interviewing the Russian subsource. I don't know about you, but I always thought the Russian subsource was somebody based in Russia in the bowels of the Russian government risking their lives, trying to get information out to the Democratic Party.

The Russian subsource, we now know, was on the payroll of Christopher Steele. And he also had a working relationship with the Brookings Institute. And we have learned from the memo that we declassified that the Russian subsource, who was American-based, not Russian-based, told Christopher Steele: Here's what I have got. It is bar talk. It's rumor. It is innuendo. It is not really reliable.

And what did Christopher Steele do with that? He turned it into a Tom Clancy novel. He sold it to the FBI. They sold it to the FISA court to get a warrant against Carter Page. And what does this memo show?

Then, in January 2017, when they found the Russian subsource, who was in the United States, he disavowed the dossier as being reliable. The FBI knew it, did a 40-page memo. But the FBI continued to lie to the court, getting new warrants based on the dossier in April and June of 2017. After they knew it was a bunch of garbage, they continued to use it anyway.

Somebody needs to go to jail.

BARTIROMO: So, tell me about the criminality, because...

GRAHAM: Yes.

BARTIROMO: ... if that subsource told the FBI agent, this is all bar talk...

GRAHAM: Right.

placeholder
BARTIROMO: ... this is all hearsay...

GRAHAM: Yes.

BARTIROMO: ... why didn't the FBI stop renewing warrants to spy on Carter Page?

GRAHAM: That is the central accusation that I'm trying to find out. I'm doing oversight. Durham is doing a criminal investigation.

Here is what I can tell you, that Peter Strzok new that the subsource was not reliable. In the notes that we declassified where Strzok is commenting on the February 14 New York Times article, he indicates in there that Steele does not have insight into the reliability of the subsource.

So, that tells me that Strzok knew about the interview with the subsource in January, where the subsource says it is all bar talk and hearsay. So, Strzok has a duty to report to the court exculpatory information. He has a duty to notify his superiors that the key document to get a warrant against Carter Page, the Russian dossier, is no longer reliable.

I find it impossible to believe that McCabe and Comey were not made aware of this 40-page memo. Think about it for the moment. What's the odds that somebody would go to the trouble of writing a 40-page memo, shredding the reliability of the Russian dossier, and not tell other people in the FBI about it? I think there's zero chance that happened.

placeholder
And anybody that knew that the Russian dossier was unreliable and continued to get a warrant against Carter Page based on that document should go to jail for defrauding the court.

BARTIROMO: So, you are calling witnesses down to get interviewed in front of your committee.

GRAHAM: Yes.

BARTIROMO: You have got Sally Yates coming soon.

GRAHAM: Yes. Right.

BARTIROMO: Are you going to call Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe?

GRAHAM: Yes, absolutely, at the end.

placeholder
But I want to call Sally Yates. But let me tell you who I want to call for sure, is, I want to call the person who prepared the memo. I want to call the case agent who interviewed the subsource for three days in January and ask him, oh, by the way, did you tell anybody above you that the dossier is a piece of Russian disinformation?

They're laughing their ass off in Russia. This New York Times article that somehow the subsource has been compromised, nobody in Russia is mad at this subsource who is U.S.-based, because the subsource took a bunch of Russian disinformation, sold it to Christopher Steele, who sold it to the FBI.

What happened here is that Russian disinformation was used by American law enforcement in weapons form to go after a sitting president. They're laughing their ass off in Russia about this. They would give this guy a medal.

BARTIROMO: Mm-hmm.

So, tell me about the Sally Yates interview. That is happening on August 5.

GRAHAM: OK. Right. Right.

BARTIROMO: That is coming up. What do you want to find out from Sally Yates?

placeholder
GRAHAM: Three things. Three things.

Ms. Yates has previously testified that she met with President Obama and Vice President Biden, I think it was Comey and Brennan and a few others, to talk about the ongoing surveillance of General Flynn, who was the incoming national security adviser.

At that meeting, she learned for the first time -- and she is number two at the Justice Department on January the 5th, 2017 -- that the FBI was surveilling General Flynn. What shocked her the most is that Obama knew about it, and she didn't.

Now, what do I want to ask her? I want her explain to us, how is it possible the president of the United States knows about a surveillance of the incoming national security adviser, General Flynn, and you didn't?

And did she hear Vice President Biden mention whether or not Flynn may have violated the Logan Act? And I want to under -- I want her to explain to us what kind of system is in place?

On January the 4th, the FBI agents in the field recommended dropping General Flynn from Crossfire Hurricane because there was no there there.

So, really, what I want to hear from Flynn is, how could Obama know and she didn't? And did Biden mention that we should be looking at Flynn in terms after a Logan Act violation? If he said that, that is contrary to what he has been saying publicly.

placeholder
BARTIROMO: Well, what did they also say -- what did the FBI say to Congress?

Because I remember John Brennan being interviewed...

GRAHAM: Stay tuned.

(LAUGHTER)

BARTIROMO: ... in testimony to -- in front of Trey Gowdy.

GRAHAM: Yes. Yes.

BARTIROMO: And he said to Trey Gowdy, we did not use the dossier. It was a small part of the overall mosaic.

placeholder
GRAHAM: Right.

BARTIROMO: What about the FBI and what it told Congress? Is lying to Congress a 10-year felony, as Trey Gowdy has said on this program?

GRAHAM: So, stay tuned.

Next week, you are going to learn more. Not only do we now know that the FBI lied to the FISA court about the reliability of the dossier. They told the court that the subsource was truthful and cooperative and Russian- based.

The truth of the matter is that the subsource was American-based. He was an employee of Christopher Steele, who was on the payroll of the Democratic Party. And he told Christopher Steele, this is all a bunch of hearsay.

And when the FBI understood that the dossier was no longer reliable, they continued to use it. But we also now have found -- and this will come out next week -- that Congress got suspicious about the Russian subsource and the reliability of the Steele dossier and that members of Congress asked to be briefed about it.

I will tell you next week what I found. And here is what I think I'm going to be able to show to the public. Not only did the FBI lie to the court about the reliability of the Steele dossier. They also relied -- lied to the Congress. And that is a separate crime.

BARTIROMO: So, that is a second criminal -- that is a second criminal act, then?

GRAHAM: And this is in 2018.

So, again, I want to emphasize this, that the Congress got suspicious, the Intelligence Committee did, about Steele and the reliability of the dossier. The intelligence community did not want to include the dossier in the intelligence assessment provided to President Trump about the 2016 campaign because they didn't trust it.

So, they started asking questions at the FBI in 2018 about the subsource and how reliable this information was. And I found the notes that the FBI used to prepare that briefing. Mr. Horowitz told us about them. I found them.

Stay tuned next week. You're going to find, not only did the FBI lie to the FISA court. They lied their ass off to the Congress.

BARTIROMO: Unbelievable. This is more breaking news. We will follow your reporting next week, Senator.

(LAUGHTER)

BARTIROMO: Real quick, before you go, you have been knee-deep on working on another package for the shutdown and the coronavirus response.

GRAHAM: Yes. Right.

BARTIROMO: Are we going to see you pass something before the Senate leaves on August 8? What is the conversation now about those unemployment benefits, which will go away on July 31?

GRAHAM: Well, here's the problem we have.

Seventy percent of the people, almost, on unemployment are making more unemployed than they did when they worked. We need to change that. State benefits are trying to replace 50 percent of lost wages.

What Mnuchin wants to do is have a federal benefit to take it up to 70 percent. Our goal is to give you 70 percent of the money you lost by being employed, not to give you a pay raise in unemployment.

We have got to fix that. We have got to take care of kids. We have got $100 billion in this package to safely get kids back to school. And hospitals are beginning to be overrun again by new admissions. So we have got money to help our health care system.

placeholder
Half the Republicans are going to vote no to any phase four package. That's just a fact. And a lot of Democrats are going to insist on $3 trillion, which would be way too much. It would be wasted money.

I'm confident that President Trump will lead us to a solution where we have money for kids, jobs, and health care. We need to stimulate the economy. We need a phase four. And I think we will come together before August the 5th to get this done.

BARTIROMO: All right, we will leave it there. We will be watching.

Lindsey Graham, thanks for your leadership in all of this. We appreciate your time this morning, sir. Thank you.

GRAHAM: Thank you.

BARTIROMO: Senator Lindsey Graham joining us there.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source