Republican Senators Call for Special Counsel to Investigate Barack Obama

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are calling for a special counsel to be appointed to investigate the Trump administration’s incendiary allegations against former President Barack Obama and senior members of his administration.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents pertaining to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which President Donald Trump won. In the days since, Gabbard, Trump, and their allies have alleged that those documents serve as evidence of a “treasonous conspiracy” led by Obama against Trump.

National Review, The Wall Steet Journal, and Fox News’ Andy McCarthy have all rejected this framing, but that didn’t stop Gabbard from confirming that the administration was considering prosecuting Obama for his alleged role in the conspiracy on Wednesday, or Graham and Cornyn from asserting that “appointing an independent special counsel would do the country a tremendous service in this case.”

“With every piece of information that gets released, it becomes more evident that the entire Russia collusion hoax was created by the Obama administration to subvert the will of the American people,” argued Graham and Cornyn.

Both the Journal and National Review noted in recent editorials that former Special Counsel John Durham had already investigated the origins of the investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government.

“Mr. Trump is still angry, understandably so, about the lurid and fictional Steele dossier and how he was dragged down an empty ‘collusion’ rabbit hole. Yet special counsel John Durham has already picked over this episode,” observed the former.

“Special counsel John Durham, who was tapped by the Trump I DOJ to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, spent four exhaustive years on the probe. As his 306-page report concludes, the Clinton campaign was principally responsible for fabricating the story, and the FBI was recklessly irresponsible in opening a full investigation and using the dossier in court without rudimentary verification steps,” submitted the latter. “But he drew the correct conclusion that ‘even horribly bad judgment’ and ‘unseemly or unethical conduct’ are not crimes absent violation of a particular criminal statute.”