Lindsey Graham Insists Trump Administration Was Too ‘Incoherent’ to Pull Off Quid Pro Quo
In an attempt to discredit allegations about President Donald Trump’s quid pro quo proposal with Ukraine, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) argued that the administration was incapable of setting up the unethical deal because of their “incoherent” relationship with Kyiv.
Graham, who made the comment on Wednesday while speaking with reporters in the Capitol Building, dismissed the updated congressional testimony from U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, in which the diplomat recalled telling an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that “U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”
“The whole process is a joke. ….You [media] just pick things you like. Ya’ll hate this guy [Trump]. Ya’ll want to get him impeached. I’m not buying into Schiff running a legitimate operation over there. …This is a political vendetta.” — @LindseyGrahamSC pic.twitter.com/RprXX4GHVJ
— Kevin Bishop (@KevinDBishop) November 6, 2019
“The whole process is a joke. The whole idea that there’s a quid pro quo based on somebody changing their testimony presuming there was,” Graham said, before describing the impeachment inquiry into Trump over his push for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden as “a political vendetta.”
“What I can tell you about the Trump policy toward Ukraine. It was incoherent,” the senior South Carolina senator added. “It depends on who you talk to; they seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”
Graham, who has passionately defended the president throughout the Ukraine scandal, continued by excoriating the media’s coverage of the impeachment investigation: “You just pick things you like. Y’all hate this guy, you want to get him impeached. I’m not buying into [Rep. Adam] Schiff (D-CA) running a legitimate operation over there.”
Shortly after the release of Sondland’s revised testimony on Tuesday, Graham said he does “not know” if Trump’s actions with Ukraine constitutes a quid pro quo violation, adding, “We put conditions on aid all the time. But if you said I’m not going to give you money unless you investigate my political opponent to help me politically, that would be completely out of bounds.”
Watch Graham’s comments above, via Twitter.
