Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham dropped the f-bomb on live TV Wednesday during his opening statement of Attorney General William Barr’s hearing on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Graham started by reading aloud from texts recovered from then-members of Mueller’s investigative team Peter Strzok and Lisa Page: “August 26, 2016: Just went to the southern Virginia Wal-Mart. I could smell the Trump support. October 19, 2016: Trump is a f**king idiot. He’s unable to provide a coherent answer.” (RELATED: Peter Strzok Deleted ‘Personal’ Communications With Lisa Page)
“Sorry to the kids out there,” Graham immediately apologized for his use of profanity. “These are the people that made a decision that Clinton didn’t do anything wrong and that counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign was warranted.”
WATCH:
Graham, now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opened the hearing by noting that the Mueller report had certainly concluded that Russians had interfered with the 2016 election — and would likely continue to make attempts to meddle in future elections.
He argued:
I would like to do more to harden our infrastructure because the Russians did it. It wasn’t some 400-pound guy sitting on a bed somewhere, it was the Russians. And they’re still doing it. And it could be the Chinese, it could be somebody next. So my takeaway from this report is that we’ve got a lot of work to do to defend democracy against the Russians and other bad actors and I promise the committee we’ll get on with that work hopefully in a bipartisan fashion.
Graham mentioned bipartisan legislation to be presented by himself and Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin that would work to fight similar situations in the future.