Jake Tapper Calls Out Lindsey Graham’s ‘Confusing… Jarring’ Comments on Ukraine, Impeachment

CNN’s Jake Tapper closed out State of the Union this morning calling out Senator Lindsey Graham’s “political evolution,” particularly his recent defenses of President Donald Trump amid the House impeachment inquiry.

Tapper said Graham was invited on the show this week because they wanted to ask about “his views of the mounting evidence that President Trump’s team was pushing Ukraine to publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens.”

He reviewed Graham’s “confusing” public statements in the past few weeks, from him calling the Ukraine call a “nothing (non-quid pro quo) burger” to his comments to Axios that “if you could show me that Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing.”

“We now have reams of evidence,” Tapper said. “Testimony from multiple Trump administration diplomats and national security officials current and former suggesting that outside that phone call, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Rudy Giuliani, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney all were pushing Ukraine to investigate the Bidens if they wanted that aide in that White House meeting.”

Graham recently defended the Trump administration in comment saying the White House Ukraine policy was too “incoherent” for them to form a quid pro quo, and even saying he wouldn’t read the transcripts because “this is a bunch of BS.”

Tapper noticed a similarity between those remarks and an infamous comment from Congressman Earl Landgrebe regarding Watergate: “Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

Tapper said the shift from Graham is “jarring” and showed a clip of the senator’s speech memorializing his longtime friend John McCain, in which Graham said, “Don’t look to me to replace this man. Look to me to remember what he was all about and try to follow in his footsteps.”

Tapper concluded by asking, “Is Senator Lindsey Graham trying to follow in the footsteps of John McCain? Or is he trying to follow in the footsteps of Earl Landgrebe?”

You can watch above, via CNN.