South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham stated in a Sunday interview that “someone” at the Federal Bureau of Investigations “needs to go to jail” after he accused the body of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee during its probe of the Steele Dossier in 2018.
Graham made the comments in an interview on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo following the release of previously redacted FBI documents. Graham claimed those files showed that the law enforcement agency had established that most of the contents of the dossier — which was the catalyst for an investigation into President Donald Trump’s links with Russia — were likely false.
“The subsource said, it was all bar talk, hearsay speculation, and conjecture, and the whole [bedroom] activity of the president was made in jest,” Graham explained.
Graham alleged that instead of reporting the nature of the file’s probable unreliability to the Intel Committee, the FBI misinformed the group by stating that there was “no evidence from the subsource to suggest that Steele fabricated anything in the dossier.”
The senator added that he believed the bureau chose to mislead the Senate because disclosing the unreliable nature of the file would have called into question the ethics of using the same information as the source of a FISA warrant, which allowed the agency to gain access to Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The bureau was, in fact, rebuked in 2019 by the FISA court for using evidence that was “inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation” in its successful request for a warrant, according to NBC News .
“If they told the truth to the Senate Intel Committee in 2018, the dossier is not reliable, it would expose the crime they committed to the FISA court,” Graham stated. “The subsource completely denied the reliability of the [information], but the FBI continued to lie as late as 2018… Somebody needs to go to jail for this.”
Graham concluded by stating that he was planning to write Christopher Wray in the hopes that the director would “explain” his agency’s briefings to Congress.
The South Carolina senator also made headlines this week when he joined a number of Republican lawmakers who voiced their disapproval of Trump’s recent series of executive orders, as was previously reported by The Inquisitr .
The orders, which extended coronavirus relief efforts such as unemployment benefits and a pause on evictions, came after Congress remained in gridlock on the issue and was unable to pass a bipartisan legislative package.
