Report: McCain blames Graham, smartphone for ‘odd’ Comey questions

PHOENIX — U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) made national headlines in June for his “odd” line of questioning during a Senate hearing with former FBI Director James Comey, but a new interview reveals what happened — and who was to blame.

McCain spent nearly nine minutes questioning Comey at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on June 8, during which the former FBI head revealed details about his private interactions with President Donald Trump.

But McCain’s line of questioning went a bit off the rails, diving into concerns about an unrelated investigation into former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email servers and, at one point, calling him “President Comey.”

At the time, McCain admitted that he “didn’t follow that line of questioning very well” and off-handedly blamed a late-night Arizona Diamondbacks game for the confusion.

“Maybe going forward I shouldn’t stay up late watching the Diamondbacks night games,” he said at the time.

But according to Esquire, McCain blamed his good friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for knocking him off course, calling the episode a “colossal screw-up.”

According to accounts from both McCain and Graham, the South Carolina senator gave McCain a question to ask Comey via a smartphone.

McCain said he was reading the message from Graham on the phone “two minutes before it was [his] turn” to speak, when the phone went black and locked him out. McCain told Esquire that he thought, “‘What the [expletive] am I going to do here?'”

The senior senator from Arizona told Esquire that he would have reverted to his prepared line of questioning, but that his relationship with Graham is important and he “knew that this must be important. So I started out trying to remember what was on the [phone], and, anyway, to make a long story short, I [expletive] it up.”

But Graham told Esquire he was trying to get McCain to ask Comey, “If you’re willing to clear Clinton, why won’t you comment on something else?” but couldn’t remember what the “something else” was.

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