Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is calling on former FBI Director James Comey to testify to Congress again after it was revealed Comey drafted a letter exonerating Hillary Clinton before the investigation into her emails was completed.
“This doesn’t add up, and I smell a rat here,” Graham told Fox News on Thursday.
Senators Graham and Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed last week that sources told them Comey was drafting a letter clearing Clinton of any wrongdoing weeks before the FBI had interviewed Clinton herself and before they talked to 17 other witnesses.
The letter seems to contradict Comey’s testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee in September 2016, where he told the panel that his “decision [to exonerate Clinton] was made after that because I didn’t know what was going to happen in that interview.” (VIDEO: New Comey Revelations Undercut What Ex-FBI Chief Told Congress Last Year)
Graham said Comey “needs to come back to committee” to discuss two issues–whether he “predetermined the result” of the Clinton email investigation and if he came public with the investigation results because of “some email between the DNC and the Justice Department about the scope of the Clinton investigation.”
During a June 2017 hearing in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said that he chose to go public because of the tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton.
“Yes, in an ultimately conclusive way, that was the thing that capped it for me – that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation,” Comey said at the time.
But Graham said that in other settings, Comey told him “that the real reason he got involved was because he thought that there was an email the Russians had between the DNC and Justice Department trying to wire the Clinton investigation,” which, of course, would run contrary to his Senate testimony.