President Donald Trump is "way too smart" to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, Republican Sen. John Kennedy said Friday.
"I don't think the president is going to fire Mr. Mueller," the Louisiana Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" co-host Sandra Smith about a Senate Judiciary Committee bill that passed, with a bipartisan vote, on Thursday to protect Mueller.
"I think he is way too smart for that. He hasn't fired Mr. Mueller. I don't think Mr. Mueller ought to be fired. I think Mr. Mueller ought to be allowed to finish this investigation."
Kennedy said he not only didn't vote for the proposal, but that Senate Majority Leader McConnell "will not take the biil up on the Senate floor."
Even if the bill somehow passed the Senate floor, "and it wouldn't," Kennedy said, "the House isn't going to pass it. If the House passed it, and it won't, but if it did, the president is not going to sign it. What's the point?"
Four Republicans, including Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, voted with all 10 of the committee's Democrats to push the bill to the Senate floor, but Kennedy said his own position on the matter is "pretty clear."
He also said he knows Trump has "vented" about Mueller, because "he is upset about it."
"I'd be upset too," said Kennedy. "He is trying to run the country and I'm sure he is irritated about the investigation but we have to let Mr. Mueller finish. I don't see any indication that Mr. Trump is going to fire Mr. Mueller.
"I mean, it would be like introducing a bill to say well, the president can't get out of NAFTA. Well, he hasn't gotten out of NAFTA. He is renegotiating it. Why don't we wait and see how it turns out before we have our 19th nervous breakdown?" Kennedy said.
Kennedy also said he sees no reason to think otherwise that Mueller is carrying out a fair and independent investigation.
"There are leaks," he said. "We don't know if they're true or not. Mr. Mueller needs to be allowed to finish. We have a rule of law in this country."
He disagreed, though, with a statement from Sen. Dianne Feinstein that the measure is a bipartisan effort, because "this bill is dead as a doornail. It got out of Judiciary Committee but it won't be considered on the Senate floor."
Meanwhile, Kennedy has introduced a bipartisan bill on internet privacy, but he hopes it doesn't have to pass and that social media companies will take their own action.
"All our bill does is pretty simple," said Kennedy. "It says Facebook has to tell you what it is doing and it has to write it in plain English. It has to give you the chance to opt out of sharing your data and it has to tell you if you want to opt in, rather, and you change your mind, you can opt out later. It has got to tell you if your data has been breached within 72 hours, and it's got to present all this on the website so you can find it easily and understand it when you find it."
The way it is now, Kennedy said, "you've got to run all over hell and half of Georgia to find all the right buttons" to get answers.
He also insisted that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows the problem.
"I was a little disappointed in the hearing with him," said Kennedy. "It was well prepared and he is fluent in BS. But now it's time for him to fix this problem and we won't have to get into it."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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