Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday that he didn’t intend to be “the Republican Christopher Steele” when it came to former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, referencing the British former intelligence officer who compiled a dossier of unsubstantiated opposition research against then-candidate Donald Trump.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, one of President Trump’s most vocal allies in the Senate, made the comment on CBS’ “Face the Nation” after host Margaret Brennan asked him about a cryptic tweet from Trump reading “DeFace the Nation will tell @LindseyGrahamSC that he must start up Judiciary and not stop until the job is done. Clean up D.C. now, last chance!”
Graham said that he believed the tweet was in reference to reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant process after Justice Department Inspector General Anthony Horowitz’s report on the origins of the FBI probe into Trump’s campaign.
“Here’s what I want to tell the president: I’m not going to be the Republican Christopher Steele,” Graham said. “Rudy Giuliani last night said he’s got the goods on Hunter Biden … I called the attorney general this morning and [Sen.] Richard Burr [R-N.C.], the chairman of the Intel Committee, and they told me ‘take very cautiously anything coming out of the Ukraine against anybody.’”
{mosads}Graham said that he continued to think “questions about the conflict of interest regarding Hunter Biden in the Ukraine need to be asked” but that “if Rudy Giuliani has any information coming out of the Ukraine, he needs to turn it over to the Department of Justice, because it could be Russian propaganda.”
Any such claims, Graham said, “need to be looked at by the intelligence services who have expertise I don’t.”
Graham suggested Attorney General William Barr had created a process by which Giuliani could take Ukrainian findings directly to the Justice Department, saying Barr had told him that “they had created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”
Conspiracy theories that Ukraine was involved in large-scale election interference similar to that of Russia’s in the 2016 election were part of the investigations Trump attempted to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to undertake. At an impeachment hearing, former National Security Council figure Fiona Hill said such claims are in Russian propaganda.