Graham, Lindsey Sen

SEE TWO LIED 2020 ELECTION

SHIT EAT GRIN AF1 POST VENEZ? 1 26

primary on brett k, evil pending, many tags 9/18

abandon principle and went far right, once briefly tri-lat climate bill

capt 916, see bak

never trumper? brief bout of conscience/temper tantrum on kurd sellout, but pivot right back to djt koolaide on impeachment?

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WOW AN 1 26

When Donald Trump was facing four criminal indictments, two of them stemmed from his efforts to overturn the United States' 2020 presidential election results: a federal case prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and a Georgia case prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both of those cases were doomed when Trump narrowly defeated Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024.

In 2020, Trump and his allies claimed, without evidence, that Democrats stole Georgia's electoral votes from him — a claim that two prominent Republicans in the Peach State, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pushed backed against. Kemp and Raffensperger adamantly maintained that then-President-elect Joe Biden won Georgia fair and square.

Kemp and Raffensperger spoke publicly and on the record. But according to New York Times reporters Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, other Republicans spoke candidly about Georgia's 2020 election results in closed-door testimony from 2022.

In an article published on January 13, Fausset and Hakim explain, "Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by the New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president's efforts to overturn an American presidential election. The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election."

Those transcripts, according to the Times reporters, "were part of the investigative file" in Willis' election interference/RICO case against Trump and others and were "conducted by a special purpose grand jury."

Republicans who testified included Kemp, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and former Georgia House Speaker David Ralston.

Describing the testimony, Fausset and Hakim report, "Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina found President Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020 'unnerving.' Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia described Mr. Trump's efforts to get his state's lawmakers to intervene a 'fruitless exercise.' David Ralston, a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, called the plan to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states he had lost 'the craziest thing I’ve heard.'"

Graham, according to Fausset and Hakim, had no doubt that Biden won Georgia when he spoke to the grand jurors in 2022.

Graham testified, "I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short…. If you told him Martians came and stole votes, he'd be inclined to believe it."

Recalling a conversation with Trump after the 2020 election, Ralston testified that "right off the bat, I've got to tell him I disagree with him."

*Read Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim's full article for The New York Times at this link (subscription required).

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an 1119

Lindsey Graham just gave Trump what he wanted all along: An investigation into BidenCody

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/510818-trump-yates-either-lying-or-grossly-incompetent

no lnx vod

trump: Yates either lying or grossly incompetent

BY MORGAN GSTALTER - 08/06/20 08:16 AM EDT 1,747

President Trump on Thursday accused former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates of “either lying” or being “grossly incompetent” after her testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Justice Department investigations into election interference in 2016.

“It is not possible she could have known so little about Dirty Cop James Comey (and others) from her high position in the Department of 'Justice,'" the president tweeted early Thursday. “Thepolitical Crime of the Century, [// fox hanty tucker rhet on obamagate]and she had no idea what they were doing?”

Yates told the committee that the FBI, under the leadership of then-Director James Comey, in January 2017 interviewed incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn without her authorization or advanced knowledge.

"I was upset that Director Comey didn't coordinate that with us and acted unilaterally," Yates said.

"Did Comey go rogue?" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked.

"You could use that term, yes," Yates responded.

Despite her criticism of Comey’s handling of the process, Yates defended the FBI’s need to interview Flynn due to his conversations with the then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak after the November 2016 election.

"Interviewing General Flynn was really right at the core of the FBI's investigation at this point to try to discern, what are the ties between the Trump administration and the Russians?" she said during her testimony.

Flynn was fired in 2017 for misleading Vice President Pence about those conversations. He had initially entered into an agreement in 2017 to cooperate with the Department of Justice and pleaded guilty, but he subsequently withdrew from the plea agreement and was fighting the charges.

The Justice Department decided earlier this year to drop the case against Flynn, a decision that sparked outrage among Democrats, who claimed Attorney General William Barr was politicizing the agency.

Yates, asked about the decision to drop those charges on Wednesday, said she thought it was “highly irregular.”

Prior to her testimony,Trump lashed out at Yates and tweeted that she has “zero credibility.”

“She was a part of the greatest political crime of the Century, and ObamaBiden knew EVERYTHING! Sally Yates leaked the General Flynn conversation? Ask her under oath. Republicans should start playing the Democrats game!” Trump tweeted.

Trump fired Yates in January 2017, while she was serving as acting attorney general, after she refused to defend his controversial travel ban

When asked if she doesn’t like Trump, Yates told senators, "I don't respect the manner in which he has carried out the presidency."

[Trump attacks Cuomo after his Democratic convention speech

Roger Stone drops appeal of felony convictions]

“You despise Donald Trump, don’t you?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) shot back.

“I don't despise anyone, senator,” Yates added.

The GOP is ramping up their Obama-era investigations and Graham is centering his efforts around the origins of of the FBI’s investigation into Russia's election interference and the Trump campaign as well as former special counsel Robert Mueller’s subsequent probe.

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omg ct packing #1 guy

One of Trump’s worst judicial nominees yet, Steven Menashi, was just voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a straight party-line vote.

What’s worse,Judiciary Committee Chair– and infamous Trump lackey – Lindsey Graham rammed Menashi through committee right on the heels of a New York Times report that, when he was serving as Sec. Betsy DeVos’s right-hand man at the Dept. of Education, Menashi helped construct an elaborate and ILLEGAL scheme to deny debt relief for thousands of students swindled by a for-profit college!

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denounced trump on abandon kurds; he met them? xian? but adam schiff BS the next day?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/lindsey-graham-turns-on-trump-over-syria-withdrawal-isis-is-not-defeated-this-is-the-biggest-lie-being-told-by-this-administration/

grraham (R-SC) took to Fox News on Monday morning to harshly criticize President Donald Trump’s decisions to pull U.S. military forces out of Syria putting America’s Kurdish allies at risk of being slaughtered by Turkish forces.

Graham began by making a statement on Twitter, writing, “I don’t know all the details regarding President Trump’s decision in northern Syria. In process of setting up phone call with Secretary Pompeo. If press reports are accurate this is a disaster in the making, ” before adding, “Also, if this plan goes forward will introduce Senate resolution opposing and asking for reversal of this decision. Expect it will receive strong bipartisan support...

beware wishful think. break w/ djt //

1019

What a disaster’: Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade battles his co-hosts after they defend Trump’s decision to ‘abandon our allies’ in Syria

Brian Kilmeade, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” on Monday…

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a random eg?

And then, finally, perhaps most importantly, Koch has built a nationwide activist network called Americans for Prosperity. And what this is is a boots-on-the-ground operation. So, Americans for Prosperity has chapters around the country. They can activate people to go knock on doors, take petitions. They will charter busesfrom West Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, you name it. They will get buses of angry voters[pseudo-populist trigger anti-gubmint] to come to Washington, D.C., and then go visit congressional offices that have been specifically identified by that big corporate lobbying shop we talked about, where they can pressure lawmakers.

And Koch put this political machine into full force in 2009 and 2010, when it looked like the United States was going to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for the first time. You know, back then, there really was bipartisan support to do something on climate change. The Republican, John McCain,ran on doing something about climate change. But Koch Industries intervened, and, I think more than even Exxon or other companies, it sort of — it politicized this issue of climate change. And Koch went after any moderate Republicans who acknowledged that climate change was real, who supported any effort to put a price on carbon. And Koch helped to drive those people out of office. So it played a vitally important role in making it clear to Republicans that they could not support any effort on climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: The Kochtopus? Elaborate further.

CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The Kochtopus, here’s a great example. In 2009, when we were debating climate change, my book shows that Koch secretly funded a think tank report from this group called the American Council [for] Capital Formation. And this report said that if we regulate climate change, it will be a disaster for the American economy. Then another Koch-funded think tank called the American Energy Alliance took the findings from that report, made political ads and targeted those ads at Republican politicians, like Lindsey Graham, who supported climate change legislation, so now Lindsey Graham has got these horrible campaign spots running back home. And then the corporate lobbyists from Koch will be visiting the offices of Lindsey Graham and explaining why they can’t support climate change bill.

So, the Kochtopus is this remarkably effective 360-degree machine that affects the public debate around issues like this, that has lobbyists who work on issues like this, and that can, finally, bring voters in. You know, Americans for Prosperity will — I’ve been at these events where they bus voters into Washington, D.C. They give them glossy printed protest signs. They feed them a boxed lunch. They take them to the congressional offices. And they can stoke what appears to be a real public revolt against legislation like this.

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Much has been written about CUFI’s influence in the Republican Party, which began under the George W. Bush administration soon after its founding. As journalist Max Blumenthal noted in a 2006 article for The Nation:“Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).” 

As a result of these meetings, CUFI aligned itself tightly with the neoconservatives that were well represented in the Bush administration, even appointing neoconservative andChristian Zionist Gary Bauerto its board and naming Bauer the first director of its lobbying arm, the CUFI Action Fund. Bauer is a founding member of the highly controversial and now-defunct neoconservative group, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and has also served on the executive board of the neoconservative group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). 

CUFI has since won powerful allies and counts neoconservative Elliott Abrams; former CIA director James Woosley; neoconservative archon Bill Kristol; former ArkansasGovernor Mike Huckabee; Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and U.S. Vice President Mike Penceamong its staunchest supporters. At a CUFI summit last year, Netanyahu described CUFI as a “vital part of Israel’s national security.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/hawks-pushing-trump-toward-war-can-it-be-stopped/

digby AN  no lnx twt

right and early Thursday morning, President Trump angrily declared on Twitter: “Iran made a very big mistake!” He had obviously heard the news that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had shot down a very expensive American unmanned drone over international waters. (You know how he feels about money.) It was obviously some kind of threat but not too much later he met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and told the assembled press corps that he had “a feeling … that it was a mistake made by somebody,” giving the impression that he either knew this wasn’t an act ordered by the top Iranian brass or was just trying to offer them a way out.

Later in the evening, this happened:

Peter Baker

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@peterbakernyt

• 14h

Trump approved a strike on Iran to be launched tonight in retaliation for drone shutdown but then abruptly changed his mind and pulled back. @shearm @EricSchmittNYT @michaelcrowley @maggieNYT https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/middleeast/iran-us-drone.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage …

“Let’s see what happens,” President Trump said Thursday after Iran shot down an American surveillance drone.

Trump Approves Strikes on Iran, but Then Abruptly Pulls Back

Military and diplomatic officials still expected a strike as of 7 p.m. Thursday in retaliation for Iran shooting down an unmanned American drone.

nytimes.com

Peter Baker

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@peterbakernyt

As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting the strike. The president had approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries. But then he pulled back, at least for now.

According to the New York Times, the operation was already underway with planes in the air and ships in position to fire missiles just before dawn on Friday. As of this writing nobody seems sure what prompted Trump to pull back when he did. There’s no word on whether or not it was due to a change in the situation or simply another of his impulsive actions. The fact that the news media found out about it so quickly argues for the latter. People don’t leak something like that unless they are shocked by what went down.

Considering Trump’s behavior on Thursday, it’s possible he is simply playing out some elaborate “Madman” kabuki. But I’m afraid it’s even more likely that he was watching Tucker Carlson, who argued on his Fox News show that war with Iran wouldn’t be popular with the Republican base. (If so: Thank you, Tucker.)

Whatever the case, we very nearly went to war on Thursday night. And yes, this is 100% Trump’s fault. He and his team have been putting what they call “maximum pressure” on Iran and this is the result. Evidently, Trump thought the Iranians would immediately start sending him “beautiful letters” but they are trying a different tack.

You’ll recall that during the early months of the 2016 campaign, when asked about the Iran deal, Trump told “Meet the Press” that he expected Iran to get nuclear weapons and bring on a nuclear holocaust. He nonetheless said he wouldn’t violate the non-proliferation agreement because “it’s very hard to say, ‘We’re ripping it up.’” As the campaign unfolded he changed his mind but until he fired former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and hired John Bolton, the most fanatical anti-Iran hawk in America, he had been persuaded to stick with the nuclear deal.

When Bolton joined the team, the agreement was quickly abrogated and the inevitable escalation began. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was able to keep Bolton on a short leash for a while but when fellow Iran hawk Mike Pompeo became secretary of state and Mattis resigned (to be replaced by a player to be named later) all bets were off.

Ever since, the administration has been more and more provocative, hitting Iran with crippling sanctions, designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization (against the advice of the State Department) and letting Bolton run his mouth with ever more belligerent rhetoric, daring the Iranians to respond. Meanwhile, Trump dithers,pretending that his inability to understand the situation or make a decision is actually a conscious strategy of being “unpredictable.”

Trump’s credibility is nonexistent around the globe so nobody believes him no matter what he says. Russia, North Korea, China and Iran are all starting to circle, flex their muscles and poke at the beast to see what it will do. And here we are.

Jacob Heilbrun, writing in the Spectator USA, points out that Trump really doesn’t want war with Iran but observes that he’s unknowingly assembled a war Cabinet:

If Trump stumbled into war, he would resemble Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I, who backed Austria, only to be sidelined by his generals once the conflict began.Trump would be utterly at sea in trying to preside over a war in the Persian Gulf that could easily spiral out of control. If Trump can’t even appoint a permanent defense secretary, why would anyone imagine he has the competence to conduct a war against Tehran?

It’s very unclear if his war hawks are any more competent than he is. Heilbrun notes that Pompeo has even been advancing “loopy theories, reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s folderol on the eve of the second Gulf War, that the Iranians are in cahoots with al-Qaeda.”

In response to that fatuous argument, which was clearly designed to make the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force against al-Qaida apply to these planned military strikes, the House voted to end the AUMF. (That legislation will die in the Senate, of course.)  But Pompeo should have checked with the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, Attorney General William Barr, who would have told him there’s never any need for congressional authorization for military action. That’s what he told President George H.W. Bush when he was contemplating launching the first Gulf War. (In Bush’s defense, he didn’t buy it, asked the Congress and the UN for a vote and pulled together a global coalition.)

As many of you no doubt remember, back during the crazed days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, these arguments were flying all over the place. George W. Bush got a vote in Congress with no problem but couldn’t get global buy-in because his rationale for invading Iraq was nonsensical and everyone knew it. It was well known that certain hard-right war hawks were hoping that it would be just the first step. As Paul Krugman noted at the time:

It’s a matter of public record that thiswar with Iraq is largely the brainchild of a group of neoconservative intellectuals, who view it as a pilot project. In August a British official close to the Bush team told Newsweek:”Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” In February 2003, according to Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper,Under Secretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq the United States would ”deal with” Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Remember, allegedly reluctant warrior Donald Trump is the one who hired that guy to be his national security adviser. He also hired Pompeo. And he is almost certainly listening to his good buddy,Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’s been advising him that he needs to get “points on the board,” meaning he must use military force somewhere in order to be taken seriously. (Graham was pushing for a Venezuela invasion, but Trump has lost interest in that one, so Iran will have to do.)

I suspect that argument carries some weight. But Trump really only cares about one thing: re-election. If they want to convince him to let the bombs fly to prove he’s got brass, his hawks are going to have to convince him that his base will love it. They will, of course. They are America’s most fervent supporters of military action and if Trump does it they’ll love him all the more.

Shh. Don’t anybody tell him about Republican voters’ love of war. His ignorance of that fact is the only thing keeping the peace.

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see distraction

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trio-of-republican-senators-demand-doj-hand-over-information-on-clinton-email-probe-as-ag-barr-prepares-for-release-of-redacted-mueller-report/

As Attorney General William Barr prepares the release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is reportedly recruiting other Republican senators help with a separate endeavor. As MSNBC reports, “a trio of top Republican senators” are demanding the Justice Department “hand over information on the handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”

Graham, along with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to Barr on Tuesday requesting documents pertaining to the department’s investigation of the former secretary of state.

The document request comes despite federal investigators clearing Clinton of criminal wrongdoing, and a separate Justice Department inspector general examination that reviewed the department’s probe. According to Politico, the trio of senators have requested a “classified briefing on steps the Justice Department plans to take in light of its inspector general’s 2018 report,” according to Politico.

“Now that the Special Counsel’s investigation has concluded, we are unaware of any legitimate basis upon which the Department can refuse to answer the Judiciary Committee’s inquiries,” Graham, Johnson and Grassley — who chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee, respectively — wrote in their letter to Barr.

The lawmakers also claimed a portion of the inspector general’s report “raises significant issues associated with the FBI’s failure to review certain highly classified information in support of its Midyear investigation.”

As Politico notes, Graham has likewise pledged to investigate whether the DOJ and FBI attempted to influence the 2016 to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.

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GOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to Russia

FILED UNDERCOMMENTARY  AT AUG 2017 SHARE

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Ruth May, Contributor

Connect with Ruth May Email

Editor's note: Ruth May wrote this column in August 2017. Click here for an extensive update.

Party loyalty is often cited as the reason that GOP leaders have not been more outspoken in their criticism of President Donald Trump and his refusal to condemn Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Yet there may be another reason that top Republicans have not been more vocal in their condemnation. Perhaps it's because they have their own links to the Russian oligarchy that they would prefer go unnoticed.

Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.

During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.

How Putin's proxies helped funnel millions into GOP campaigns

Marco Rubio's Conservative Solutions PAC and his Florida First Project received $1.5 million through Blavatnik's two holding companies. Other high dollar recipients of funding from Blavatnik were PACS representing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at $1.1 million, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at $800,000, Ohio Governor John Kasich at $250,000 and Arizona Senator John McCain at $200,000.

In January, Quartz reported that Blavatnik donated another $1 million to Trump's Inaugural Committee. Ironically, the shared address of Blavatnik's companies is directly across the street from Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in New York.

Len Blavatnik, considered to be one of the richest men in Great Britain, holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K. He is known for his business savvy and generous philanthropy, but not without controversy.

In 2010, Oxford University drew intense criticism for accepting a donation of 75 million pounds from Blavatnik for a new school of government bearing his name. Faculty, alumni and international human rights activists claimed the university was selling its reputation and prestige to Putin's associates.

Blavatnik's relationships with Russian oligarchs close to Putin, particularly Oleg Deripaska, should be worrisome for Trump and the six GOP leaders who took Blavatnik's money during the 2016 presidential campaign. Lucky for them no one has noticed. Yet.

How some evangelical Christians are complicit in the cruelty of politics

Oleg Deripaska is the founder and majority owner of RUSAL, the world's second largest aluminum company, based in Russia. Len Blavatnik owns a significant stake in RUSAL and served on its Board until November 10, 2016, two days after Donald Trump was elected.

Deripaska controls RUSAL with a 48 percent majority stake through his holding company, EN+ Group, and the Russian government owns 4.35 percent stake of EN+ Group through its second-largest state owned bank, VTB. VTB was exposed in the Panama papers in 2016for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Vladimir Putin and is under sanctions by the U.S. government.

Cyprus is at the center of a circle of corruption surrounding Trump

Deripaska has been closely connected to the Kremlin since he married into Boris Yeltsin's family in 2001, which literally includes him in the Russian clan known as "The Family."According to the Associated Press, starting in 2006, Deripaska made annual payments of $10 million to Paul Manafort through the Bank of Cyprus to advance Putin's global agenda.

Len Blavatnik's co-owner in RUSAL is his long-time business partner, Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch with close ties to  Putin. Blavatnik and Vekselberg hold their 15.8 percent joint stake in RUSAL in the name of Sual Partners, their offshore company in the Bahamas. Vekselberg also happens to be the largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus.

Another oligarch with close ties to Putin, Dmitry Rybolovlev, owns a 3.3 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus. Rybolovlev is known as "Russia's Fertilizer King" and has been in the spotlight for several months as the purchaser of Trump's 60,000 square-foot mansion in Palm Beach. Rybolovlev bought the estate for $54 million more than Trump paid for the property at the bottom of the crash in the U.S. real estate market.

The convoluted web that links Putin's oligarchs to Trump's political associates and top Republicans is difficult to take in.

Trump and Putin have a common approach to governance. They rely heavily on long-term relationships and family ties. While there have been tensions between Putin and Deripaska over the years, the Kremlin came to Deripaska's rescue in 2009 when he was on the verge of bankruptcy by providing a $4.5 billion emergency loan through state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB), where Putin is chair of the advisory board.

VEB, known as President Putin's "pet bank," is now in crisis after sanctions applied by Europe and U.S. in 2014 have isolated it from the international banks that were the sources of its nearly $4 billion in hard currency loans that, according to Bloomberg, mature this year and in 2018.

Russia's international currency reserves are near a 10-year low, which has put further pressure on the president of VEB, Sergey Gorkov, to find sources of international rescue capital. Notably, it was Gorkov who met secretly with Jared Kushner in December at Trump Tower. Kushner's failure to report the meeting with Gorkov has drawn the attention of the Senate intelligence committee that now wants to question Kushner about the meeting.

Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @ruthcmay

CORRECTION, 12:11 p.m., August 7: The headline on an earlier version of this column incorrectly said Blavatnik is Russian. He was born in Urkraine during the Soviet era.

An earlier version of this column used the name Leonid "Len" Blavatnik. He changed his first name to Leonard.

The column has also been updated to remove language describing the online presentation of a press release about Blavatnik resigning from the RUSAL board because it lacked context.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/lindsey-grahams-shameful-descent-how-a-maverick-turned-into-a-trump-sycophant/

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Lindsey Graham’s shameful descent: How a maverick turned into a Trump sycophant

Lindsey Graham’s shameful descent: How a maverick turned into a Trump sycophant

written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon February 1, 2019

7

Once John McCain's BFF and a harsh Trump critic, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair now wants to pursue Hillary.

Two new TrumpWorld books were published this week, one by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the other by an unknown former White House staffer by the name of Cliff Sims. The only interesting parts of Christie’s book concern his thirst for revenge against Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, a beef that goes back years to when Christie put Kushner’s father in prison for a sordid blackmail and fraud scheme. The other book, however, is a bit more revealing. Sims was on the campaign and then spent 15 months in the White House as a trusted Trump confidant. He took notes.

Sims appeared on the “Late Show” with Steven Colbert and made a comment that struck me as particularly observant:

“One of the things I try to do in this book is help people understand what makes Donald Trump tick. And one thing that never goes out of style in the Trump White House is someone who’s willing to go on TV and just fight it out with somebody. He knows [Kellyanne Conway] will go out there on any show and defend him.”

“So private loyalty doesn’t matter, but public loyalty on television is more important?” Colbert asked.

Sims replied, “I think there’s no doubt that public loyalty to the president is of utmost importance to him.”

The comment made me think about the weird dynamic between Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of Trump’s fiercest defenders these days. Everyone knows it wasn’t always that way. Back during the campaign, when Graham was running against Trump, and for some time afterward (when Graham dropped out but supported Jeb Bush), he was scathing in his assessment.

Graham called Trump a kook and a race-baiting bigot, among other things. According to this New York magazine profile by Lisa Miller, during the transition, Graham and his mentor, the late Sen. John McCain, plotted to lead a “brave Republican resistance.” But McCain became terminally ill and Graham opportunistically shifted his loyalty to the president.

Miller writes that it all happened over lunch one day when “Graham and Trump discovered their mutual love for bro-ish trash talk and golf.” She quotes a friend saying that Graham sees himself as the adult in the room and that “there’s something about, I’m not going to say innocence, but the president’s affability as well as his naïveté that Lindsey is drawn to.”

In other words, Graham thinks he’s able to manipulate Trump into doing his bidding. Indeed, according to a friend who knew Graham’s thinking, he literally made that cynical calculation:

Graham understood that “all Trump really cares about is being celebrated,” this person said. By genuflecting to Trump, Graham could seem to be in collaboration with him — the impression probably most important to the president — and “move mountains behind closed doors.”

Whether Graham “moves mountains” is debatable but I think that strategy has been obvious for a while. What’s interesting to me is how he’s going about it. Someone who has the president’s ear is in a powerful position, and today Graham is closer to Trump than any other senator. This scene was memorialized on Twitter just this week:

Benny

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@bennyjohnson

Had dinner next to President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin & his COS.

Their table had a lively conversation.

Lindsey spoke on his flip phone a lot.

Trump had shrimp, French fries & steak (well-done) & Diet Coke

?? ?? ??

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5:55 PM - Jan 28, 2019

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Graham has betrayed his alleged principles and maverick reputation across the board, even as he makes half-hearted efforts to present himself to the press as an independent thinker who breaks with the president when he disagrees with him. He often falls back on his traditional conservative hawk credentials on foreign policy, coming before the cameras and sighing deeply when Trump makes one of his impulsive, ill-informed national security decisions which the GOP establishment perceives as a bridge too far. Graham will say he thinks it’s a mistake and promises to talk to the president about it. Once in a while he’ll feel compelled to weakly criticize Trump’s crude behavior or blatant racism.

As Cliff Sims pointed out in that interview, that’s obviously not something Trump ever wants to hear. He wants people to publicly defend him, no matter what. So Graham is walking a fine line and has to go beyond flattery to stay in the president’s good graces. It appears he’s discovered the best way to do that is to become a vicious, conspiracy-mongering attack dog. Trump will forgive almost anything if someone goes after his enemies with the same fervor he does.

We all watched Graham turn into a feral animal during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings and he has frequently appeared on Trump’s favorite shows, “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity,” performing for an audience of one and warning the Democrats that he’s coming for them:

You know, to my Democratic friends, if you want to look backwards, we are all going to look backwards. I want to know why the FBI reached the conclusion, along with the Department of Justice, that Hillary Clinton didn’t commit a crime. Was it because of political bias? … I intend to look at it. I’m going to look at it. If you are going to keep plowing everything up in 2016, count me in. If you want to look for it, I will look for it.

From his position as chair of the Judiciary Committee, Graham has the ability to deliver some real red meat to the president and his followers. Last week Igor Derysh reported for Salon on Graham’s plans to investigate Hillary Clinton, something I’ve been predicting for more than a year. All you have to do is watch Fox News for any 10-minute interval and you’ll see that their Clinton obsession burns even hotter than it did in 2016. Now Graham is prepared to throw fuel on the fire.

This week in the latest episode of phony handwringing from the newly anointed civil libertarians of the Republican Party, they are all bellowing about how the FBI treated the self-aggrandizing dirty trickster Roger Stone — which was the same way it would treat any other accused criminal.  Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said the FBI had staged “what was, in effect, a military assault on Roger Stone.” Andrew Napolitano lamented, “This is jackboots in America, and there is no place for that in American life!”

Here’s onetime Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio, rending his garments over the inhumanity of it all, and being schooled by journalist Radley Balko, an expert on militarized law enforcement excesses:

Radley Balko

?

@radleybalko

Arpaio once sent 40 SWAT cops, a bomb robot, K9 units, and Steven Seagal to arrest a man suspected of cockfighting. Seagal drove an APC into the man's living room. They destroyed the guy's house with explosives, then filmed it all for a reality TV show. https://twitter.com/RealSheriffJoe/status/1090314139451285504 …

Sheriff Joe Arpaio

@RealSheriffJoe

Sheriff Joe on FBI's Roger Stone Raid: Ive Been Busting Down Doors for 50 Years &; Ive Never Sent That Many Units to the Baddest Murderer https://www.westernjournal.com/sheriff-joe-fbis-roger-stone-raid-busting-doors-50-years-never-sent-many-units-baddest-murderer/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons …

33.5K

2:03 PM - Jan 29, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

13.2K people are talking about this

Yes, the people who gleefully shout “Lock her up!” are suddenly very concerned about due process.

And Lindsey Graham, the man who has previously argued that the government should be able to imprison people for life without trial, has dutifully joined the chorus, using his powerful chairmanship to demand that the FBI explain itself.

Donald Trump is no doubt very pleased to see Graham sticking up for his friend and going after his enemies publicly on TV. But a word of caution: Graham’s ego is getting pretty inflated and he might just slip up and forget who’s the leader and who’s the sycophant. There is a long line of discarded toadies in Trump’s wake.

Of course, if that happens Graham can always write a book.

==

PO'd on no cia testimony?

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/lindsey-graham-openly-admits-he-will-let-trump-officials-get-away-blatant

==

AN

Lindsey Graham has dedicated himself to finding who he believes are the real villains uncovered during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings -- the Democrats.

On ABC news' "This Week," Graham continued his defiant response presented during the hearing, vowing to "do a wholesale, full scale investigation of what I think was a despicable process to deter it from happening again."

Said Graham, "The FBI will do a supplemental background investigation, then I'm going to call for an investigation of what happened in this committee. Who betrayed Dr. Ford's trust? Who in Feinstein's office recommended Katz as a lawyer? Why did Ms. Ford not know that the committee was willing to go to California?"

Graham has also suggested that there is no need for the FBI to do any sort of investigation into Brett Kavanaugh, disputing host George Stephanopoulos on the relevancy of looking into witnesses who may contradict his testimony.

"He's had six FBI background checks. He's been on the political stage for 26 years. He's not a stumbling, bumbling drunk," said Graham. "I don't believe that he could have accomplished what he's accomplished to have been a serial rapist in high school and stop it for the rest of your life"

Graham contends that the allegations against Kavanaugh are political in nature.

"All I can tell you is it came from somebody with a political motive. There were three people who had the letter, people in Feinstein's office, the congresswoman from California, and Ms. Katz and the legal team," said Graham. "No friend would do this to Dr. Ford. I believe her when she said she wanted to remain anonymous."

View the full transcript.

==

Graham: From ‘John McCain’s Wingman to Donald Trump’s Carnival Barker’

By Alex Henderson, AlterNet

Although Graham reached a new low on September 27, this wasn’t the first time he has been over-the-top in his support of Kavanaugh and President Donald J. Trump.  READ MORE»

Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is actively blocking his own committee’s investigation, refusing to subpoena Trump’s financial records or compel new testimony from key witnesses like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump Jr, despite new information emerging.

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham are doing the White House’s bidding by calling for a criminal investigation -- not against those who worked with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election, but against a whistleblower who compiled a research document exposing that interference.

==

4 gop green sen

https://thinkprogress.org/these-4-republican-senators-are-forming-a-group-to-tackle-climate-change-dc667e9f8eb5#.lb11aa1tc

==

bit of a wild card?  pal of kyl

~ trump and stuck to it

~ TP

tri-party climate bill?

==

http://grist.org/climate-energy/these-two-republican-presidential-candidates-defended-climate-science-during-debate/

==

http://ecowatch.com/2015/08/07/fox-debate-graham-climate-change/

Fox News Asks Sen. Graham: How Can Republicans ‘Trust’ You After Working on Climate Bill?

During yesterday’s 5 p.m. ET Fox News Republican presidential debate, moderator Bill Hemmer asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) how Republicans could “trust” him after his “extremely unpopular” collaboration with Democrats on a cap-and-trade bill to address climate change. Graham reportedly warned Democrats at the time that they needed to accelerate negotiations on the bill as quickly as possible, “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process.” The network would go on to make a deliberate effort to undermine efforts to pass climate legislation.

During the debate, Hemmer asked Graham, “you worked with Democrats and President Obama when it came to climate change, something you know is extremely unpopular with conservative Republicans. How can they trust you based on that record?”

[vid]

Ryan Lizza reported in The New Yorker that during 2010 negotiations on that climate bill, Graham urged fellow senators to move quickly on legislation before Fox found out about it (emphasis added):

At a climate change conference in South Carolina on January 5, 2010, Graham started to sound a little like Al Gore. “I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution” are “not a good thing,” Graham said. He insisted that nobody could convince him that “all the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day in and day out,” could be “a good thing for your children and the future of the planet.” Environmentalists swooned. “Graham was the most inspirational part of that triumvirate throughout the fall and winter,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said. “He was advocating for strong action on climate change from an ethical and a moral perspective.”

But, back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves.We have to move this along as quickly as possible.'”

Fox News hosts and guests would go on to viciously attack the bill, which never came to a vote in the Senate. Graham ultimately withdrew from the bipartisan climate efforts, subsequently claiming that he didn’t believe human-caused emissions “are contributing overwhelmingly to global climate change.”

Media Matters later obtained an email from Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon to Fox journalists instructing them in the midst of the 2010 climate bill debate on Capitol Hill to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” Sammon has since been identified as the “secret weapon” helping Fox journalists “craft the questions” for the evening debate.

==

kerry-lib-lindsy g

fox story scuttled LG?

 ===

ecoW

Lindsey Graham probably won’t be getting any money from the billionaire Koch brothers either. He’s acknowledged that all the climate denial going on in the GOP might not be healthy for them.

“I think there will be a political problem for the Republican Party going into 2016 if we don’t define what we are for the environment,” he said late last year. “I don’t know what the environmental policy of the Republican Party is.”

As for his own position, he said he accepts that humans are driving climate change but rejects cap-and-trade as a solution and claims that Al Gore has turned it into a “religion.”

“I’m for finding oil and gas that we own,” he said on Fox News last month. “I’m for clean coal, I’m for natural gas, but I would like a lower carbon economy over time. Clean up the air and create jobs in the process.”

==

http://grist.org/politics/the-tea-party-cant-stand-this-presidential-hopeful/

This story was originally published byMother Jonesand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Tea Party hates South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the feeling is mutual. It attacked the Republican lawmaker mercilessly during his Senate reelection campaign in 2014, but Graham held his seat with 55 percent of the vote. “Kicking the crap out of the Tea Party is the most fun Senator Lindsey Graham has ever had,” wrote Molly Ball for The Atlantic last June after interviewing the South Carolina Republican on the eve of his primary election victory, when he faced six no-name challengers, one of them a Tea Party pick, in his deep red state’s Republican primary.

On June 1, Graham plans to join the crowded GOP 2016 field, according to his preannouncement on Monday. And his soon-to-be presidential campaign raises the question: How will the Graham/Tea Party feud continue?

The animosity between this three-term senator and Tea Partiers began before his 2014 reelection campaign, triggered in part by Graham’s intermittent attempts to work with Democrats in the Senate. Such moves have enraged staunch conservatives. The Greenville GOP compiled a list of 29 offensesthat they “strongly disapprove of and hold to be fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the South Carolina Republican Party.” Right-wing blogs have nicknamedhim “Flimsy Lindsey” and “Grahmnesty” because he disagreed with his party on climate change, immigration reform, and a few other hot-button Republican issues.

Climate change triggered the first Tea Party salvos against Graham. In the fall of 2009, Tea Partiers in South Carolina and beyond bashed Graham for his support of energy legislation that aimed at reducing carbon emissions. In an editorial titled “Graham’s Dalliance With Cap-And-Trade Crowd a Bad Move,” Michael Costello of the Idaho’sLewiston Tribune wrote, “If Republicans really want to completely alienate this crowd and give birth to a third party, they should follow the lead of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). [He] has thrown his lot in with John Kerry (D-Mass) to push one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history, the carbon cap-and-trade bill.”

Soon after that, as Politico reported, the conflict between Graham and Tea Partiers “sparked a mutiny back home” in South Carolina. The Charleston County Republican Party, in a written resolution, slammed Graham for stabbing Republicans in the back and undercutting “Republican leadership and party solidarity for his own benefit.” Politico noted that “bubbling” conservative discontent blew up because of the climate change bill but was also fueled by Graham’s support for immigration reform and changes at the U.S. detention facility Guantanamo Bay. Graham, a hawk who often criticizes President Barack Obama’s national security policies, didn’t try to make peace with his conservative critics. Instead, he called detractors of immigration reform “bigots” and refused to disavow or stop his occasional bipartisan efforts.

“I’m making that a Tea Party goal to get scoundrels like Lindsey Graham out of office,” Greg Deitz, a Charleston Tea Party organizer, told *Politico*.

In 2010, about 100 Tea Party activists gathered outside Graham’s office in Greenville, S.C., to protest his support for the bipartisan climate bill. “No cap-and-trade,” they chanted. Two different countywide GOP organizations in South Carolina voted to censure Grahamnoting that “in the name of bipartisanship — [he] continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism.”

Tea Party activists routinely booed him when he spoke at town hall meetings. At one gathering at the Bluffton Library in June 2010, activists in the audience interrupted Graham with angry questions and accusations when he asked what the biggest problems facing the world were. One audience member, according to the Beaufort Gazette, told Graham to “be conservative and quit reaching across the aisle.”

Graham further upset the Tea Party by meeting with Obama several times to discuss working together on various issues, such as “closing Guantánamo Bay and bringing terror suspects to justice,” according to Newsweek. Graham was a former military prosecutor who served on the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, and Joe Biden invited him over to his home for a steak dinner to discuss Afghanistan.

In July of 2010, Graham toldthe New York Times that the Tea Party would “die out” because “they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country.”

A few months later, though, Graham tried to mend a few fences. In September, during a private meeting with Tea Party organizers in North Charleston, he attempted to address Tea Partiers’ concerns. Later, he praised the movement in interviews, including one with Politico where he said Tea Partyactivists “[came] to Washington talking about reducing spending. Thank God they’re here.” He even tried to get the Senate’s two Tea Party caucus founders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee, to help him push legislation on Social Security in 2011, which would raise the retirement age to 70 and cut retirement benefits for the wealthy. By August 2011, around the second time he asked for a private meeting with local Tea Party leaders, Graham bragged to the Associated Press that his new push for fiscally conservative policies had united him with the conservative right.

The détente did not hold. When Graham was up for reelection in 2014, Tea Partiers were chomping at the bit to defeat him. The only thing they lacked was a candidate who could win in a Republican primary, where Graham needed 50 percent of the vote to avoid a run off.

“There was speculation that he would face severe Tea Party resistance,” says Robert Wislinski, a political strategist based in South Carolina. “[But] that never really materialized.” Graham raised $13 million for the primary race, and mobilized a powerful campaign. Five challengers who were seeking their first elected office, and one incumbant state senator, ran against him, but their combined campaign war chest was only about $2 million. The Republican opposition was split, and Graham’s opponents weren’t particularly well known. Nor did the opposition get any help from national Tea Party activists like Sarah Palin, who remained silent on the race. “The conservative opposition could not unify for the singular purpose of defeating Graham,” wrote the conservative blog RedState in January, and Graham won with 56 percent of the vote.

So Graham beat the Tea Party and went on to win easily the general election. But will his presidential bid give Tea Partiers another chance to cause him political pain?

So far, the Tea Party has been silent on his campaign. The South Carolina Tea Party convention did not respond to request for comment, and neither did multiple national Tea Party organizations.

Either way, Graham’s hawkish rhetoric and lack of national popularity make his chances for election pretty low. If the Tea Party has their way, those chances might be even lower.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lindsey_Graham

Lindsey Olin Graham is the Senior Senator for the state of South Carolina. He is a Republican and was first elected in 2002.(map)

Record and controversies

General information about important bills and votes for can be found in Congresspedia's articles on legislation. You can add information you find on how Lindsey Graham voted by clicking the "[edit]" link to the right and typing it in. Remember to cite your sources!

Iraq War

For more information see the chart of U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Iraq War.

Graham voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 that started the Iraq War.^[1]

In February 2007, Graham called the Democrats' attempt to bring a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop "surge" in Iraq to a floor vote a “stupid political game,” said Democrats were “afraid” to vote on funding for the war.

Main article: Congressional actions regarding President Bush’s 2007 proposed troop “surge” in Iraq

Subjection of civilians to military law

In a provision earmarked to a spending bill towards the end of the 109th Congress, Graham pushed for the jurisdiction of military courts martial over U.S. civilian contractors in Iraq. The provision was introduced in order to "bring uniformity to the commander's ability to control the behavior of people representing our country." The alleged need for such a provision became apparent amidst several instances of accused U.S. civilian contractor misconduct in Iraq that went unpunished. [5]

• See Congresspedia page on laws covering military contractors in Iraq.

Iran

On September 20, 2007, Sens. Joe Lieberman, Jon Kyl, Norman Coleman, and Lindsey Graham filed a "Sense of the Senate" resolution as Amendment No. 3017^[2] to the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill "that the U.S. should 'combat, contain, and roll back' Iran’s 'violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq.' It counsels doing so 'through the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of [U.S. power], including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments.' It also urges the administration to designate the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization."^[3]

Stepping stone to war

On 16 February 2012, Senator Graham together with Senators Robert Casey, Joe Lieberman and Richard Blumenthal, introduced Senate Resolution 380, requiring the US government to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.^[4] Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, states about this resolution:

They and the other senators have presented their proposal in a particularly deceptive fashion, asserting that they are actually supporting the White House position, which they are not. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta repeated on Feb. 16 that Iran does not have and is not currently building a nuclear device. Before Christmas, he stated clearly that the “red line” for the United States is actual Iranian possession of a nuclear weapon. Even Israel’s intelligence services agree that Iran is not building a bomb. What we are seeing play out in Congress is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) position, which is that Iran has already crossed a “red line.” The AIPAC argument will no doubt be spelled out in more detail next month at the group’s annual convention in the nation’s capital, a meeting that will be addressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and will attract nearly all of Washington’s power brokers.^[5]

MJ Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer and current commentator, states the same thing. The resolution amounts to the first step to a US war against Iran.^[6] Rosenberg concludes:^[6]

As noble as their professed concern for Israel may be, the United States is supposed to come first for United States senators. McCain and Graham ought to be ashamed for standing in a foreign country and blatantly placing its government's interests before ours.

But, hey, it's politics, and what could be more important than nailing down support for the next election?

Environmental record

For more information on environmental legislation, see the Energy and Environment Policy Portal

Controversy

Gang of 14- Judicial filibuster

On May 23, 2005, Graham was one of the Gang of 14 senators to forge a compromise on the Democrats' use of the judicial filibuster, thus blocking the Republican leadership's attempt to implement the so-called "nuclear option". Under the agreement, the Democrats would retain the power to filibuster a Bush judicial nominee only in an "extraordinary circumstance", and the three most conservative Bush appellate court nominees (Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen and William H. Pryor, Jr.) would receive a vote by the full Senate. Despite being one of the Senate's more conservative members, he worked on the deal with seven other Democrats to prevent the "nuclear option" from occurring. This has led to anger among the GOP conservative base in his home state.

Graham has suggested that the Gang of 14 could be a valuable coaltion to pass Social Security reform. He told Chris Matthews on Hardball in May 2005, "Watch this group of 14 to come out with some deal for Social Security." Graham later "clarified that Social Security reform was not broached during the negotiations that led to the deal that forestalled the 'nuclear option.'"[6]

Guantanamo and Graham Amendment

It was Graham, the former Judge Advocate, who uncovered previously classified memos showing that military lawyers opposed as illegal the George W. Bush White House's orders to use harsh methods to interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Graham's request produced the declassification and release of the memos in July 2005. One of the memoranda, authored by the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, said several of the "more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law" as well as military law, according to the New York Times.[7] Rives also wrote that executing the White House's orders "puts the interrogators and the chain of command at risk of criminal accusations abroad."

More recently, Graham authored an amendment to a Department of Defense Authorization Act restricting the authority of American courts to review applications of habeas corpus by "enemy combatants,"[8] effectively nullifying a June 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing detainees to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their detentions.(Read Graham's Commentary in the Washington Post ) The amendment passed by a vote of 49-42 in the Senate, sparking outrage among many human rights groups and legal scholars. ^[7]

High-profile legal scholars including Judith Resnik of Yale Law School, David Shapiro and Frank Michelman of Harvard Law School, and Burt Neuborne of New York University Law School circulated a letter describing the legislation in the starkest of terms:^[8]

"The Graham amendment embodies an effort to alter fundamental precepts of our constitutional order. It consigns the protection of fundamental human liberties to unilateral executive determination."

Terror detainee treatment legislation

In September 2006, Graham drew attention when he joined with fellow Republicans John Warner (R-Va.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to oppose legislation backed by the Bush Administration that would have given the government wide freedoms in the treatment, interrogation and prosecution of terror detainees. In addition, the legislation would have included a reinterpretation of the U.S. duties under the Geneva convention. The three senators proposed their own, more moderate legislation dealing with the same issue. ^[9]

On September 21, the three dissenting senators reached a compromise with the White House which included many of the provisions from the administration's initial bill, but eliminated the use of secret evidence unavailable to the defense during terror trials and any explicit reinterpretation of the Geneva Convention. ^[10]

Alito Confirmation Hearings

During the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, Graham was accused by Democrats of having coached Alito before the hearings, having sat on a "moot court" at the White House before the hearings.[9] The Village Voice went so far as to state, "Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, may very well have irreparably compromised himself." [10] According to Think Progess, a project of the American Progress Action Fund, "Coaching a judicial nominee behind-the-scenes is not the proper role for a Judiciary Committee member who must subsequently sit in judgment on that nominee," writes Think Progress, . "It could be a violation of the ethical duties of a senator." [11]

Judge rules against service as a military judge

On September 22, 2006, a military court ruled that it is unconstitutional for Graham to serve simultaneously as a military judge. The court never passed on the question of whether Sen. Graham could continue to serve as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

In a statement, the U.S. Court of Appeals said, “One of the purposes served by the separation of powers is that a military accused will not be judged by a member of Congress.” The Air Force announced that it would consider appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Air Force also noted that Graham has been reassigned to a position in the Air Force Administrative Law Division of the Pentagon. [12]

Biography

Background

Graham was born July 9, 1955 in Central, South Carolina. He graduated from the University of South Carolina at Columbia with a B.A. in Psychology in 1977, and from its school of law with a J.D. in 1981. In 1988, Graham went into private law practice.[13]

Graham served in the United States Air Force (1982-88) as a lawyer, and then in the South Carolina Air National Guard and as an Air Force reservist. During the Gulf War, he was recalled to active duty, serving as a Judge Advocate at McIntire Air National Guard Station in Eastover, South Carolina, where he helped brief pilots on the law of armed conflict, prepared legal documents for deploying troops, and provided legal services for family members of the South Carolina Air National Guard. He received a commendation medal for his service at McEntire. In 2004, Graham received a promotion to Colonel in the US Air Force Reserves at a White House ceremony by President George W. Bush along with Steve Buyer, who was promoted to Colonel in the US Army Reserves. Graham is the only U.S. Senator currently serving in the Guard or Reserves. He is assigned as a Reserve Judge to the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals.[14]

In the House

In 1992, Senator Graham was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives and in 1994 to the U.S. House of Representatives. Graham, "like 32 other Republican signatories of the Contract With America, swept into Washington on the coattails of Newt Gingrich," though he later became disillusioned with Gingrich and was a key member in the 1997 efforts to oust Gingrich. [15]

Upon joining the House, Graham became a member of the powerfulJudiciary Committee. He rose to prominence during the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Graham opposed one article of impeachment in committee vote, making him the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote against any of the four articles.[16] In January and February of 1999, after two impeachment articles had been passed by the full House, he was one of the managers who brought the House's case to Clinton's trial in the Senate. Though the Senate did not convict Clinton, Graham became nationally known.

Graham was reelected to the House in 1996, 1998 and 2000.

Senate Career

In 2002, upon the retirement of the long-serving Senator Strom Thurmond, Graham defeated his Democratic opponent, Alex Sanders for Thurmond's seat.

Washington Monthly writes, "Lindsey Graham is no moderate. He came to Washington as a Newt Gingrich acolyte, served as a House manager of President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, and is pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-tax cut. According to the standard-bearing American Conservative Union, Graham has voted for the conservative position 91 percent of the time since coming to Congress in 1995, identical to the rating with which Strom Thurmond retired. Neither is Graham a maverick like John McCain " [17]

Though his stances are often conservative, he has gained a reputation for speaking out against or criticizing the party line, as well as being open to making compromises. Graham's Senate biography states, "Graham is known as a leader who never abandons his independence or strays from the conservative reform agenda. He has fought to balance the federal budget, provide tax relief to all taxpayers, keep our military adequately funded and prepared, return control of education back to parents and teachers, and ensure the government keeps its promises to America's greatest generation." [18]

Graham has recently been working on bipartisan Social Security Reform with unlikely ally, Hillary Clinton. [19]

Money in politics

This section contains links to – and feeds from – money in politics databases. cid=N00009975&cycle=2006

• Revolving door profile for Lindsey Graham from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.
• 2006 privately funded travel profile for Lindsey Graham from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.
• Personal finance profile for Lindsey Graham from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.

FIRST ELECTED:1994

Leadership PAC (1): 

Fund for America's Future

Career Fundraising

1993 - 2014 Total Receipts:	$29,250,993
1993 - 2014 Total Spent:	$19,237,888
Debts:	$0
Last Report:	Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Top 5 Contributors, 1993 - 2014

...view more data

Top 5 Industries, 1993 - 2014

...view more data

Source of Funds

	Individual Contributions	$20,528,730	(70%)
	PAC Contributions	$6,689,341	(23%)
	Candidate self-financing	$180,722	(1%)
	Other	$1,852,200	(6%)

Committees and Affiliations

Committees

• Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
  • Subcommittee on Energy, Science and Technology
  • Subcommittee on Domestic & Foreign Marketing, Inspection, & Plant & Animal Health - Ranking Member
  • Subcommittee on Rural Revitalization, Conservation, Forestry and Credit

• Senate Committee on the Budget
• Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs
• Senate Committee on Armed Services
  • Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
  • Subcommittee on Strategic Forces
  • Subcommittee on Personnel - Ranking Member

• Senate Committee on the Judiciary
  • Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts
  • Subcommittee on the Constitution
  • Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs
  • Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law

Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)

• Senate Committee on Armed Services
  • Subcommittee on Airland
  • Subcommittee on Personnel - Chair
  • Subcommittee on Strategic Forces
  • Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities

• Senate Committee on the Budget
• Senate Committee on the Judiciary
  • Subcommittee on Antitrust Competition Policy and Consumer Rights
  • Subcommittee on the Constitution Civil Rights and Property Rights
  • Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs - Chair
  • Subcommittee on Intellectual Property
  • Subcommittee on Technology Terrorism and Homeland Security

• Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs

More Background Data

• Background information on Lindsey Graham from Project Vote Smart

• Interest group scorecard ratings for Lindsey Graham from Project Vote Smart

• Voting record for Lindsey Graham from the Washington Post database

• Information on Lindsey Graham from Congress Merge

Wikipedia also has an article on Lindsey Graham. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

• See how you compare to Lindsey Graham

==

Sector Totals

WH Opposes Higher Gas Taxes Floated by S.C. GOP Sen. Graham in Emerging Senate Energy Bill

by | April 15, 2010

http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/04/15/wh-opposes-higher-gas-taxes-floated-sc-gop-sen-graham-emerging-senate-energy-bill

, "Both senators from eight states of the 'Toxic 20' states -- Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi -- supported a resolution by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., to repeal the health-protective mercury and air toxics standard."  nrdc

nyer

worried about being outed on Fox for carbon tax

n October 28, 2009, Graham was eating dinner at the Capital Grille, an expense-account steakhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, with Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Rick Davis, a Republican consultant who had managed McCain’s two Presidential campaigns. The E.D.F., virtually alone among green groups in trying to form bonds with Republicans, prides itself on being the most politically sophisticated environmental organization in Washington. Krupp, who has short gray hair and a Brooks Brothers look that announces his disdain for hemp-wearing environmental activists, had helped to educate McCain on climate change, and the two men became close. Now he wanted to do the same for Graham. He called Davis, who was an E.D.F. board member, and arranged the dinner.

Graham came to the issue strictly as a dealmaker. He saw the Democrats’ interest in capping carbon emissions as an opportunity to boost the nuclear industry and to expand oil drilling. But now Krupp explained the basics of global-warming science and policy: how carbon trading worked, how farmers could use offsets to earn an income from growing trees, and how different lobbyists would affect the debate. Krupp told Graham that the crucial feature of the policy was the hard cap on emissions. The House bill required American carbon emissions to be seventeen per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. As long as that number held, environmentalists would show flexibility on most other issues. The dinner lasted three hours. The next day, Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman held their first meeting as the triumvirate that became known to everyone following the debate as K.G.L....

Just after noon, Rimkunas, Graham’s climate-policy adviser, sent Rosengarten an e-mail. The subject was “Go to Fox website and look at gas tax article asap.” She clicked on Foxnews.com: “WH Opposes Higher Gas Taxes Floated by S.C. GOP Sen. Graham in Emerging Senate Energy Bill.” The White House double-crossed us, she thought. The report, by Major Garrett, then the Fox News White House correspondent, cited “senior administration sources” and said that the “Obama White House opposes a move in the Senate, led by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, to raise federal gasoline taxes within still-developing legislation to reduce green house gas emissions.” Including two updates to his original story, Garrett used the word “tax” thirty-four times.

“This is horrific,” Rosengarten e-mailed Rimkunas.

“It needs to be fixed,” he responded. “Never seen lg this pissed.”

“We’re calling Schiliro and getting the WH to publicly correct.”

Graham was “screaming profanities,” one of the K.G.L. staffers said. In addition to climate change, he was working with Democrats on immigration and on resolving the status of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. He was one of only nine Republicans to vote for Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Now Obama aides were accusing him of backing a gas tax, which wasn’t his idea and wasn’t even in the draft bill. Worst of all, the leakers went to Fox News, a move which they knew would cause Graham the most damage. He called one of his policy advisers that day and asked, “Did you see what they just did to me?” The adviser said, “It made him question, ‘Do they really want to get this done or are they just posturing here? Because why would they do something like this if they wanted to get it done?’ It was more than an attempt to kill the idea. It was also an attempt to tag him with the idea, and, if you want him to be an ally on the issue, why would you do that?” Graham’s legislative director, Jennifer Olson, argued that he should withdraw from K.G.L. that day.

Kerry called Browner and yelled, “It wasn’t his idea!” He added, “It’s not a gas tax. You’ve got to defend our guy. We’ve been negotiating in good faith, and how can you go and turn on him like this?” After talking to Graham, Lieberman walked into the office of his legislative director, Todd Stein. “If we don’t fix this,” the Senator said, “this could be the death of the bill.”

On April 17th, two days after the Fox story, an activist named William Gheen, speaking at a Tea Party event in Greenville, South Carolina, told the crowd, “I’m a tolerant person. I don’t care about your private life, Lindsey, but as our U.S. senator I need to figure out why you’re trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure you being gay isn’t it.” The question, with its false assertion that Graham is gay, turned into a viral video on the Web. Then Newt Gingrich’s group, American Solutions, whose largest donors include coal and electric-utility interests, began targeting Graham with a flurry of online articles about the “Kerry-Graham-Lieberman gas tax bill.” That week, the group launched a campaign in South Carolina urging conservatives to call Graham’s office “and ask him not to introduce new gas taxes.”

Kerry and Lieberman spent hours alone with Graham, trying to placate him. They forced the White House to issue a statement, which said that “the Senators don’t support a gas tax.” Graham had talked to Emanuel and was satisfied that the chief of staff wasn’t the source of the leak. Eventually, the people involved believed that they had mollified him. By the time Graham showed up at the conference table in Emanuel’s White House office on April 20th, he had calmed down. But, if he was going to suffer a ferocious backlash back home, he needed the White House to be as committed as he was. He was not encouraged when Axelrod, speaking about Democrats in Congress, noted, “The horse has been ridden hard this year and just wants to go back to the barn.”

That evening, hours after the meeting ended, a bubble of methane gas blasted out of a well of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, in the Gulf of Mexico, setting the rig on fire and killing eleven men. At the time, it seemed like a tragic accident, far away and of little consequence.

Kerry and Lieberman were desperate to accommodate Graham’s every request. The dynamics within the group changed. Aides marvelled at how Kerry and Lieberman would walk down the hallway with their arms around each other, while Lieberman and Graham’s relationship was tested by Graham’s escalating demands. The day after the White House meeting, the three senators and their aides gathered to discuss the status of the bill.

After the Fox News leak, a rumor had circulated that Congress wouldn’t pass a highway bill because of the Lindsey Graham gas-tax hike; Graham had to appease truckers in South Carolina. Now he insisted on eight billion dollars for the Highway Trust Fund, saying it was his price for staying. Frangione, Kerry’s aide, was “heartbroken,” a colleague said. It was an enormous amount of money within the confines of the bill, and spending anything on highways increased greenhouse-gas emissions. “Senator, please, just give me five minutes,” Rosengarten told Graham. “I’ll find your eight billion!” She and another Lieberman aide retrieved a spreadsheet they used to track all the spending and revenues in the bill. They fiddled with some numbers and—presto!—Graham had his money. (Later that day, Lieberman figured that, if they were going to spend eight billion dollars on highways, he might as well get some credit, too. He called the American Trucking Association to tell its officials the good news. They responded that they wanted twice that amount.)

Kerry, Lieberman, and their aides needed to keep Graham satisfied for five more days. If they persuaded him to attend the press conference unveiling the bill, he wouldn’t be able to turn back. All the other pieces were falling into place. The legislators met with the Chamber of Commerce to be sure that it would support the bill. Donohue, the Chamber president, said that he wouldn’t stand up with them at the press conference but that the Chamber wouldn’t oppose them, either.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza#ixzz17isvO5fw

Heckled at home, Graham began to enjoy a new life as a Beltway macher. “Every lobbyist working on the issue wanted time with him, because suddenly it became clear that he could be the central person in the process,” Krupp recalled. All sectors of the economy would be affected by putting a price on carbon, and Graham’s campaign account started to grow. In 2009, he raised nothing from the electric-utility PACs and just fourteen thousand four hundred and fifty dollars from all PACs. In the first quarter of 2010 alone, the utilities sent him forty-nine thousand dollars. Krupp introduced Graham to donors in New York connected to the E.D.F. On December 7th, Julian Robertson, an E.D.F. board member and a hedge-fund billionaire, hosted Graham at a small gathering in his Manhattan apartment. Some New York guests gave money directly to Graham’s campaign account. Others, at Krupp’s suggestion, donated to a new group called South Carolina Conservatives for Energy Independence, which ran ads praising Graham in his home state.

For years, Graham had lived in McCain’s shadow. But, as the rebellious politics of 2010 transformed McCain into a harsh partisan, Graham adopted McCain’s old identity as the Senate’s happy moderate. To Graham’s delight, on December 23rd Time posted an online article headlined “LINDSEY GRAHAM: NEW GOP MAVERICK IN THE SENATE.” The photograph showed Graham standing at a lectern with Lieberman and Kerry.

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McCain, worried about his reëlection, had been throwing rocks from the sidelines as the cap-and-trade debate progressed. When Waxman-Markey passed, he Tweeted that it was a “1400 page monstrosity.” A month after K.G.L. was formed, McCain told Politico, “Their start has been horrendous. Obviously, they’re going nowhere.” After the Time piece appeared, he was enraged. Graham told colleagues that McCain had called him and yelled at him, incensed that he was stealing the maverick mantle. “After that Graham story came out, McCain completely stopped talking to me,” Jay Newton-Small, the author of the Time piece, said.

Other Republican colleagues taunted Graham. “Hey, Lindsey,” they would ask, “how many times have you talked to Rahm today?,” and the criticisms in South Carolina became more intense. But Graham gave every indication to Lieberman and Kerry that he could deal with the pressure. He wasn’t up for reëlection until 2014, and his conversations with them, and with Krupp, the White House, and the Manhattan environmentalists, seemed to be having an impact. At a climate-change conference in South Carolina on January 5, 2010, Graham started to sound a little like Al Gore. “I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution” are “not a good thing,” Graham said. He insisted that nobody could convince him that “all the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day in and day out,” could be “a good thing for your children and the future of the planet.” Environmentalists swooned. “Graham was the most inspirational part of that triumvirate throughout the fall and winter,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said. “He was advocating for strong action on climate change from an ethical and a moral perspective.”

But, back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’ ”

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All the other pieces were falling into place. The legislators met with the Chamber of Commerce to be sure that it would support the bill. Donohue, the Chamber president, said that he wouldn’t stand up with them at the press conference but that the Chamber wouldn’t oppose them, either.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza#ixzz17itDypJs

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What became known as the Dayenu meeting took place on Thursday, April 22nd, Earth Day. A few hours before the meeting, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had sunk to the bottom of the Gulf. The spill began to spread; soon it would show signs of becoming one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Then, suddenly, there was a new problem:**Harry Reid**, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he wanted to pass immigration reform before the climate-change bill. It was a cynical ploy. Everyone in the Senate knew that there was no immigration bill. Reid was in a tough reëlection, and immigration activists, influential in his home state of Nevada, were pressuring him.

Senior aides at the White House were shocked by Reid’s statement. “We were doing well until Reid gave a speech and said it was immigration first. News to us!” a senior Administration official said. “It was kind of like, ‘Whoa, what do we do now? Where did that come from?’ ” Reid’s office seemed to be embarking on a rogue operation. In a three-day period, Reid’s office and unnamed Senate Democrats leaked to Roll Call, The Hill, the Associated Press, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal that the phantom immigration bill would be considered before the climate bill. Graham once again said that he felt betrayed. “This comes out of left field,” he told reporters. “I’m working as earnestly as I can to craft climate and energy independence, clean air and jobs, and now we’re being told that we’re going to immigration. This destroys the ability to do something on energy and climate.”

Graham didn’t tell the press that immigration was mostly just an excuse for his anger. That day, he had urged Reid to release a statement supporting the modified linked fee that Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman had used in negotiating with the refiners. Reid’s office greeted the request with suspicion. Reid and Graham didn’t trust each other. Reid’s aides thought the Republican leadership was trying to trick Reid into supporting something that sounded like a gas tax. The fact that Kerry and Lieberman were also supporters of the proposal did little to allay Reid’s fears. His aides drafted a pro-forma statement for Graham that promised simply that Reid would review the legislation. Graham dismissed the statement as meaningless. During one phone call, Graham shouted some vulgarities at Reid and the line went dead. The Majority Leader had hung up the phone.

At 10 P.M. the next day, Rimkunas sent Rosengarten an e-mail. They had worked together for seven months on the bill. Rosengarten had postponed her honeymoon—twice—to finish the project. They had travelled to Copenhagen together for the international climate conference and often teamed up to oppose Kerry’s office during internal debates. “Sorry buddy” is all the e-mail said. It was devastating. “Matt’s e-mail was a life low point,” she said. “It was actually soul-crushing.”

The next morning, a Saturday, Graham abandoned the talks. Lieberman was observing Shabbat and thus couldn’t work, use electrical devices, or talk on the phone. When his aides explained what was happening, he invoked a Talmudic exception allowing an Orthodox Jew to violate the Shabbat commandments “for the good of the community.” Kerry was in Massachusetts and immediately flew to Washington. The two men spent the morning trying to persuade Graham to stay. At about noon, Graham had a final conversation with Reid, who had nothing more to offer. Graham was out. He wrote a statement, and Olson, his legislative director, e-mailed a copy to Lieberman’s office. The public statement cited immigration as the issue, but attached was a note from Olson explaining that Graham was never going to receive the cover he needed from Reid on how they dealt with the oil refiners.

Rosengarten got the message on her BlackBerry while she was on the phone with Pickens’s policy people, who had no idea about the unfolding drama and wanted to make sure that their natural-gas goodies had survived the final draft of the bill. K.G.L., perhaps the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era, was officially dead. As she read Graham’s definitive goodbye letter, tears streamed down her face.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza#ixzz17iv690Kq