Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Wednesday he plans on using the powers of the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate possible misconduct with the federal investigations into both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In his opening statement as committee chairman during a hearing to question Attorney General Bill Barr, Graham moved past Barr's handling of Robert Mueller's report to talk about the unfairness and possible corruption regarding 2016 investigations. Graham argued Clinton received favorable treatment due to blatant bias against Trump from politically motivated agents of the FBI, notably Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
"We're going to—in a bipartisan way, I hope—deal with Russia, but when the Mueller report is put to bed, and it soon will be, this committee is going to look long and hard into how this all started," he said.
"We're going to look at the FISA warrant process," he continued. "Did Russia provide Christopher Steele the information about Trump that turned out to be garbage, that was used to get a warrant on an American citizen? And if so, how did the system fail? Or is there a real effort between [George] Papadopoulos and anyone in Russia to use the Clinton emails stolen by the Russians, or was that thought planted in his mind? I don't know but we're going to look."
He took a shot at the media, accusing them of being obsessed with Barr's testimony and the attempt to find anything wrong with Trump's campaign while ignoring Clinton.
"I can tell you this, if you change the names, y'all would want to look, too," he told the audience. "Everything I just said, just substitute Clinton for Trump, and see what all these people with cameras would be saying out here about this."
He went on to list forms of misconduct by Clinton and her associates that defied congressional orders, specifically in protecting her private email server used to circumvent security rules.
"There was a protective order for [Clinton's] server issued by the House and there was a request by the State Department to preserve all the information on the server. Paul Combetta, after having the protective order, used a software program called BleachBit to wipe the email server clean. Has anybody ever heard of Paul Combetta? No," Graham said.
"What happened to him? Nothing."
He also recounted the story of a Clinton aide using a hammer to smash phones authorities ordered to be handed over to the FBI, although he misidentified who it was. It was Justin Cooper, not Judith Casper, as Graham said.