Donald Trump’s Relationship With Lindsey Graham Is About to Go Very Bad
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham completely threw Donald Trump “under the bus” when the senator testified before the grand jury in Georgia’s election interference case, a new book reveals.
Graham, who has spent most of the last half-decade as a steadfast Trump loyalist, had been summoned to testify before the grand jury over a phone call he had made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. After fighting the subpoena for months, Graham finally appeared to testify—and flipped immediately, according to a new book by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.
“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his grand jury subpoena—and losing—South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus,’” Isikoff and Klaidman wrote in their book Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, citing anonymous sources.
According to the testimony, which the authors confirmed, Graham said that if you told Trump “that Martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you.”
Outside of the pages of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, Graham has positioned himself as one of the president’s most ardent defenders. Last month, he took a harsh stance against the effort among a handful of secretaries of state to kick Trump off their presidential ballots via the language of Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. And as recently as three weeks ago, Graham defended the former president’s actions on January 6, 2021, telling Face the Nation that Trump’s claim of presidential immunity was “valid.”
“Now, if you’re doing your job as president,” Graham said, a defense substantially at odds with the account documented in Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, “and January the sixth, he was still president trying to find out if the election, you know, was on the up and up—I think his immunity claim, I don’t know how it will bear out, but I think it’s a legitimate claim.”
In a hilarious side note, Graham also hinted that Trump cheated at golf, a sharp contrast to comments he made a few years earlier. In 2017, a more deferential Graham insisted that Trump “shot a 73 in windy and wet conditions!”
After his grand jury testimony, Isikoff and Klaidman wrote, Graham bumped into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who led the investigation into Trump and ultimately indicted the former president. Graham actually thanked Willis for letting him share his side of the story.
“That was so cathartic,” he said. “I feel so much better.”
Graham then hugged Willis, who seemed unperturbed by the encounter, an eyewitness told Isikoff and Klaidman.
The backstory will live in infamy: Graham called Raffensperger on Trump’s behalf soon after the 2020 election, after it became clear that Joe Biden was set to take the White House. According to Raffensperger, Graham asked whether the secretary had the power to throw out all mail-in ballots from certain counties.
Raffensperger told The Washington Post he felt Graham was asking him to illegally discount valid ballots. This phone call occurred a week before Trump’s own infamous phone call to Raffensperger, during which he begged the secretary to “find” the exact number of votes needed to flip Georgia to Trump. Raffensperger held firm in both cases.
Graham was so involved in the scheme that the special grand jury actually recommended he be indicted for his actions. The special grand jury’s full report was released in September, and it revealed that Graham and former Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue all narrowly escaped charges for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.