If the Republicans learned anything from the 2016 election season, it is this: threatening investigations and congressional hearings work. It doesn't matter if there have been multiple investigations already, with no findings of wrongdoing. It doesn't matter if the threat comes from the fevered brains of alt-right conspiracy sites (actually, that is preferred). It doesn't matter if it makes any frickin' sense at all.
Most Americans won't follow it carefully enough to parse out cynical political moves from authentic attempts at oversight. They'll just get the sense that there's something vaguely sinister about the subjects of the investigation and the grandstanding of calling witnesses and insinuating their affiliation with a vaguely-defined deep state. It all adds up to boffo ratings for their own particular audience of one: Donald Trump.
So even though Trump's own Justice department declined to prosecute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Chief Trump Enabler Lindsey Graham is about to haul him and a dozen other Trump bogeymen/women to get down to the bottom of...of....something::
What I'm going to do is I'm going to call the people who are involved in investigating the counterintelligence investigation. You have twenty-one people involved that I've named, or to find out what did McCabe and Comey know. When did they know the dossier was unreliable, but the Department of Justice has withdrawn the two warrant requests, saying they were illegal? in January 2017, the primary Russian sub-source told four members of the Department of Justice and FBI that the dossier was a bunch of bartok [sic] and hearsay and not reliable. I want to find out when did Comey and McCabe understand it was not reliable.
If that's not some authentic frontier gibberish, I don't know what is. But it doesn't matter.
What matters is that Donald Trump hears his little buddy Lindsey persecuting someone that Trump's fevered, demented, Adderall-addled mind has decided must be taken down. And for all those low info voters getting their news from the Fox family of "news" channels, it sounds like their side is getting tough against those who threaten their sense of identity.
Rinse and repeat over and over and over until November. Just like Benghazi. Graham knows not to mess with a winning formula.
