Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Sunday that the FBI is no longer trusted by conservatives when asked about comments he made in 2017 when he was urging President-elect Donald Trump to choose an FBI director who was “beyond reproach.” 

“He has a duty and obligation to pick somebody beyond reproach outside the political lane. I think he’ll do that. I hope he’ll do that. I would encourage the president to pick somebody we can all rally around, including those who work in the FBI,” Graham said in that 2017 interview.

Graham was asked by Kristen Welker on Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” if Trump’s current pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel, is “beyond reproach.” Graham said he was “talking about what he should do the last time,” according to The Hill. 

“Look, what’s happened since the last time. The FBI, in the eyes of conservatives, has become sort of a very biased organization,” Graham continued, citing how they had suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story and handled the Christopher Steele dossier.

“So the FBI we talked about then has changed. So what do I want in an FBI director now? Somebody that can clean it up, get back to the job of fighting crime. Don’t have your thumb on the political scale. Make sure it’s not used as a political weapon against people that you have a beef with. We don’t want to go back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover. What we want to do is have an FBI that’s going to call balls and strikes, and it’s going to take somebody to clean out the place,” Graham said.

“None of us trust these people anymore,” he added.