Lindsey Graham: ‘If You’re a Man Like Putin Democracy Is Your Worst Nightmare’

GRAHAM: “The one thing I can say without a doubt what we’re doing collectively is not working. Yet a foreign government apparently buying thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising to create discontent and discord in the 2016 election. You have foreign entities going to websites to create fights among Americans, like we don’t have enough to fight about on our own. So the bottom line is these platforms are being used by people who wish us harm and wish to undercut our way of life. If you’re a man like Putin democracy is your worst nightmare. If you live in Putin’s Russia the idea about exchanging information about what’s good and bad about your government is something you dare not do because you won’t last very long. So to those who wish to undermine the American way of life they’ve found portals into our society that are intermingled with every day life and the challenge of this hearing and of this focus is to how do we keep the good and deal with the bad. We’ll never be 100 percent perfect but the goal is to be better than we are today to the extent that legislation can help, we would like to know about what we could do to help. To the extent that the status quo is acceptable we all want to be on the record and say it is not.”