Two senior Republican senators implored the Justice Department Thursday to name a special counsel to probe fresh revelations about the Obama administration’s role in the Russiagate investigation that dogged President Trump’s first term.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) called for an independent investigation into whether the 44th president or his top officials “manipulated the US national security apparatus for a political outcome.”
Their public call comes one day after the DOJ formed a “strike force” to comb through recently declassified intelligence material made public by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“Appointing an independent special counsel would do the country a tremendous service in this case,” Graham and Cornyn said in a joint statement, first reported by Fox News.
“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.”
Currently, the DOJ “strike force” is evaluating next steps following Gabbard’s public accusations that the Obama administration whipped up and amplified the “Russia collusion” narrative about Trump’s successful 2016 campaign.
The first Trump administration appointed then-Connecticut US Attorney John Durham in October 2020 to investigate the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of mooted links between the Republican candidate and Moscow.
Durham wrapped up his probe in 2023, issuing a report that concluded the FBI probe was “seriously flawed” and had no basis in evidence.
“The FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” Durham wrote, later adding: “An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for [the investigation], but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”
But Graham and Cornyn want a new special counsel to conduct an even deeper and broader dive into the Obama intelligence community’s activities revolving around Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I urge Attorney General Bondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate the extent to which former President Obama, his staff and administration officials manipulated the U.S. national security apparatus for a political outcome,” Graham declared on X Thursday.
Last week, Gabbard began publicly divulging previously classified material, providing evidence that the Obama administration previously did not believe Russia hacked US voting systems before backtracking after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
Gabbard also released a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report that found Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin’s “principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process” and that he “held back leaking some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.”
That finding sharply contradicts the prevailing narrative that Putin had a vested interest in a Trump victory, with some prominent figures suggesting the Russian president possessed leverage over the Republican candidate.
Gabbard has used the declassified information to accuse the Obama administration of mounting a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine Trump’s presidency.
Critics of Gabbard have noted that a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report backed the theory that “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”
An Obama spokesman said earlier this week that “nothing” in the information released by Gabbard “undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”
These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio, now secretary of state.
