Transcript of Graham on Meet the Press

[Freddie Stubbs]

MR. RUSSERT: The director of the CIA has said it was a mistake to include words in the president’s State of the Union message about uranium from Africa, and the president and his people have said it’s time to move on. Does that settle the issue?

SEN. GRAHAM: Tim, as I see it, this is not an issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush. And it’s not a singular incident. There’s been a pattern in this administration, beginning with the development of the energy policy in the first few weeks, running through environmental policy, economic policy, and now Iraq and the war on terror, in which the American people have not been let in to understand what is going on, what the basis of decisions will be, and we end up having to go through almost a grammar lesson of word-by-word assessment of what’s been said in order to understand what the leadership of this country is intending to communicate.

MR. RUSSERT: Should the director of the CIA, George Tenet, resign?

SEN. GRAHAM: No, I don’t think this is a George Tenet problem. I think George Tenet, as was indicated in the news over the weekend, had communicated as early as October that this was bogus information, unreliable. It had been successful in the first attempt to remove from the president’s speech.

There’s another fact: Who was it that asked for this review of the Niger nuclear material question? It was the vice president. Mr. Wilson, the former ambassador, was sent to Niger in response to the vice president’s questions about this issue. So, assumedly, the vice president got a report back in response to his question and that report contained the Wilson memo of his assessment of the situation, and yet although the vice president is just down the hallway from the president’s office, information didn’t get communicated? That’s hard to believe.

more: http://www.msnbc.com/news/938330.asp