Graham: GOP to Investigate Whistleblower After Impeachment Trial

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New York City health officials said Saturday that a possible coronavirus patient is being treated at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. The patient, who is under 40, recently traveled to China and had a “fever and cough or shortness of breath without another common cause, like influenza and other cold viruses,” the health department said in a statement. It’s not clear if that person, whose identity is being kept private, had traveled to coronavirus epicenter Wuhan, where Chinese regime officials have implemented lockdowns and quarantines. The patient didn’t spend extended time with friends or family after heading back to New York City, said Mayor Bill de Blasio, according to local media outlets. He, however, called on New Yorkers to go to the hospital if they believe they are showing symptoms related to…

The Senate will investigate allegations surrounding the whistleblower, who triggered the impeachment of President Donald Trump, and Hunter Biden, another central impeachment figure, when the trial wraps up in the near future, said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in an interview.

“I want to understand how all this crap started,” he told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Graham added that the chairman of the Senate Select Committee, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), has told colleagues that he wants to ask the whistleblower questions.

It comes as Trump’s Senate trial prepares to wrap up this week. Last week, senators voted against calling witnesses in the trial, expediting the process.

The impeachment inquiry started last year after an anonymous whistleblower complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s office about a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked Zelensky to look into allegations of corruption surrounding the Hunter Biden and his father, 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden. The whistleblower’s identity has not been released.

Some Republicans have accused House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) of having contact with the anonymous person before the complaint was even filed. They have claimed the whistleblower met with Schiff’s staff. Meanwhile, there have been reports that the whistleblower was a former associate or employee of Vice President Joe Biden.

“If the whistleblower is a former employee of—associate of Joe Biden, I think that would be important,” Graham said on the Sunday talk show. “If the whistleblower was working with people on Schiff’s staff that wanted to take Trump down a year-and-a-half ago, I think that would be important. If the Schiff staff people helped write the complaint, that would be important. We’re going to get to the bottom of all of this to make sure this never happens again.”

In the impeachment trial, Schiff repeatedly said that he has no idea who the whistleblower is. He also stressed that the person’s identity should be protected due to a potential reprisal.

“I don’t know who the whistleblower is. I haven’t met them,” Schiff told the Senate last week, adding that neither he or his staff coached the person. “I am very protective of my staff as I know you are,” Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said. “The whistleblower did exactly what they should,” he added.

In addition to the probe of the whistleblower, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will investigate Joe Biden’s dealings with Ukraine. His son worked for Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings while he was in office, according to the South Carolina senator. Both Joe and Hunter Biden have denied allegations of corruption.

“I’m gonna bring in State Department officials and ask them, ‘Why didn’t you do something about the obvious conflict of interest Joe Biden had?’” Graham told the broadcaster. “Joe Biden’s effort to combat corruption in the Ukraine became a joke.” He assured Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that they “can prove beyond any doubt that Joe Biden’s effort in the Ukraine to root out corruption was undercut because he let his son sit on the board of the most corrupt company in the Ukraine and we’re not gonna give him a pass on that.”

The Biden campaign has not responded to a request for comment.

On Monday, the former vice president’s wife, Jill Biden, suggested that neither she or Joe Biden are friends with Graham. “I don’t know what happened to Lindsey. And we used to be great friends,” she told CNN. “You know, it’s hard when you, I don’t know, consider somebody a friend and then they’ve said so many things, so many negative things. And it’s—that’s been a little hurtful,” she said.

Last year, amid the allegations surrounding Biden, he told CNN that Graham “is about to go down in a way that I think he’s going to regret his whole life” after Graham said that his dealings in Ukraine should be investigated.

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A city in China’s central Hunan province said it killed thousands of chickens following an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu, according to the Chinese regime. The country’s ministry of agriculture said Saturday that 18,000 chickens were culled in Shaoyang, Hunan Province. But that came after some 4,500 chickens were sickened and died, amounting to more than half the farm’s flock. The strain of influenza was the “poultry H5N1 subtype” of the “highly pathogenic bird flu,” the statement read. No human transmission of the bird flu was reported. Shaoyang is located about 300 miles south of Wuhan, the epicenter of the new mystery coronavirus strain that that has triggered lockdowns and quarantines across Hubei province. The coronavirus has prompted a number of countries to suspend flights to and from China and…