The Bulwark Podcast - Ep. 5: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

By the time of the Ukraine scandal and impeachment, Lindsey Graham and other Republicans had grown tired of defending Trump's corrupt behavior. But they didn't blame Trump—they blamed the investigators, and essentially handed Trump the power to do as he pleased. The Bulwark Podcast presents The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, with Will Saletan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics,

therapy's a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. On September 26th, 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham ran into two reporters outside a steakhouse in Washington, D.C. That morning, the House Intelligence Committee had released a whistleblower complaint that outlined a new scandal. President Donald Trump had pressured the new president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden

who at that time was the Democratic frontrunner to challenge Trump in 2020 In the phone call, Trump had reminded Zelensky that the United States, through military aid was protecting Ukraine In other words, Trump was trying to extort Zelensky to help Trump win re-election. In that September conversation outside the steakhouse,

as it was later described by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book, The Divider, Graham told the two reporters that Trump had just called him to ask how to deal with the scandal. Graham's advice to Trump was to deny the allegations and to attack the accusers. Graham knew Trump was dishonest. In fact, Graham told the reporters that Trump was, quote,

a lying motherfucker. But despite this, and despite whatever Trump had done, Graham predicted that Republicans in Congress, out of sheer party loyalty, would stand by the president no matter what. Graham literally told the reporters that Trump, quote, could kill 50 people on our side and it wouldn't matter. That was the condition of American democracy after three years of Republican consolidation around Trump. The president, shielded by his party, could no longer be held accountable. This is The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, presented by The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Will Salatin. The Ukraine scandal was a natural sequel to two other corrupt episodes Graham had already defended.

The first one was the Russia scandal. In that episode, Trump had gotten away with soliciting foreign interference to help him defeat Hillary Clinton. So now, in Trump's re-election campaign, the president was trying a similar maneuver, this time approaching Ukraine in hopes of targeting Biden. Here's what happened in the phone call between Trump and Zelensky, as it was later described at a congressional hearing. The man answering the question in this audio clip is Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a staffer at the National Security Council, who heard the phone call in real time. So just to summarize, in this July 25th call

between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine, President Trump demanded a favor of President Zelensky to conduct investigations that both of you acknowledge were for President Trump's political interest, not the national interest, and in return for his promise of a much-desired White House meeting for President Zelensky. Colonel Vittman, is that an accurate summary of the excerpts that we just looked at?

Yes. The second previous episode that foreshadowed the Ukraine scandal was Trump's confiscation of federal funds for his border wall earlier in 2019. In that episode, Republicans had helped the president usurp congressional power over appropriations. So now Trump tried to override Congress again, this time by blocking money instead of spending it. Before Trump's phone call with Zelensky, the White House suspended military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine.

Trump and his agents then used that suspension, along with the offer of a White House meeting, which Trump was also withholding, as leverage to pressure Zelensky to announce an investigation of Biden. To the president's critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. They saw his long trail of corruption, collusion with Russia, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, sexual assault, hush money, crooked pardons, as an accumulation of evidence against him. But Trump's supporters saw it the other way around. To them, the pattern was persecution. Trump had faced one investigation after another, in their view, not because he had broken laws, but because his enemies controlled the investigating

entities, the media, the FBI, the House of Representatives, and those enemies, they alleged, were determined to take him down. This was a major reason why the institutions of a free society failed to stop Trump. His accumulating transgressions didn't just galvanize his opponents. They also galvanized his allies. Every new investigation became, in the eyes of Trump's supporters, another reason to stand with him against the media, the Democrats, and the so-called Deep State. Even allies who recognized Trump's corruption, as Graham did, lost patience with the investigations. They grew tired of defending the president.

But they didn't blame him. They blamed the investigators. Every day Graham had to spend talking about Trump's latest scandal, Russia, Ukraine, whatever, was exasperating. Graham just wanted it to end. On Sean Hannity's radio show, Graham all but admitted that the more Trump did to earn condemnation, the more Graham would defend him. And this constant nagging and criticizing everything he does has driven me into his camp like a lot of people.

I mean, enough is enough. The Ukraine investigation played out differently from the Russia investigation for several reasons. But one big reason was that by 2019, the Republican Party was reflexively committed to Trump. Graham and his colleagues had no interest in hearing about the president's latest misconduct. Before the investigation could even begin, they dismissed it. On September 24th, Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would open an inquiry to collect evidence and determine whether impeachment was warranted. The next day, literally the next day, Graham rejected that idea and condemned the inquiry as illegitimate. Later that week, Graham declared that he had, quote, zero problems with the phone call in which Trump had tried to

extort Zelensky. Instead, Graham targeted the public servants who had exposed the president's extortion. I want to know who told the whistleblower about the phone call, he demanded. In 2018, Graham had blamed the Russia investigation on anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Now, Graham blamed the Ukraine investigation on, quote, the intel community. He portrayed the president as a victim of a never-ending plot by the Central Intelligence Agency. It would blow them out of the water if, in fact, the whistleblower was connected to a Democratic candidate and came from the CIA world that's been trying to destroy the Trump presidency before he got elected. That's why they don't want you to know who this person is.

Since the whole Ukraine investigation was a conspiracy, according to Graham, the evidence against Trump could just be ignored. Subsequent reporting published in The Divider, the same book I mentioned earlier, revealed that Graham actually believed Trump had withheld the aid to Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to open an investigation of Biden. But in public, Graham insisted falsely and defiantly that, quote, there is no evidence at all the president engaged in a quid pro quo. Graham literally called the Ukraine inquiry a lynching in every sense. Weeks before the House even began its hearings, Graham pronounced the impeachment

case, quote, dead on arrival in the Senate. He refused to read transcripts of witness testimony. He refused to watch the House hearings. He refused to hear any witnesses in a Senate trial. I have made up my mind, he said. I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror. Graham still claimed to believe in democracy. But democracy, as he now described it, meant that once a president was elected, nobody could remove that president until the next election. So in a bizarre way, democracy became, in effect, an argument against holding the president accountable to the law. To begin with, Graham argued that removing the president would override the will of the voters who had elected that president to serve a full four years. Graham said that taking such a drastic step would be,

quote, destroying a mandate from the people. Graham also said that removing the president would, quote, nullify the upcoming presidential election, since Trump wouldn't be allowed to run in that election if the Senate convicted him. Only the people voting every four years could choose the president, said Graham. Any other intervention, at any other time, by anyone else would, quote, take the voters' choice away. Under this semi-autocratic theory of democracy, the president could basically do as he pleased. During the Russia investigation, Graham had struggled to excuse Trump's obstruction of the fact-finding process. But in the Ukraine investigation, Graham didn't even bother to come up with excuses.

He openly encouraged the president to block White House officials from testifying and to withhold documents requested by Congress. If I were the president, I wouldn't cooperate with these guys at all. I'm the same guy that said you can't fire Mueller. I encouraged him to work with Mueller. Mueller is a man of the law. Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi impeached this president in 48 days. I wouldn't give them the time of day. They're on a crusade to destroy this man. And they don't care.

Graham also broadened his defense of collusion. The reason he did this was that he needed to justify Trump's requests to the Ukrainian government, which were nominally disguised as attempts to expose corruption, but were clearly aimed at helping Trump politically. Those requests had come from Trump and his personal agents, not from the Department of Justice. And the requested act was a televised announcement, in other words, a political favor, not a careful behind-the-scenes examination of what Biden had or hadn't done. This is a useful moment to step back and think about the almost haphazard way in which Graham and other Republicans stumbled into authoritarianism. They did it almost through a kind of sleepwalking. For three years, Graham had been acting on a reflex. Every time Trump abused his power,

Graham simply broadened his interpretation of presidential authority to cover that offense. So whatever Trump did, according to Graham, was within his rights. That was what Graham did now. He argued, in effect, that the president was entitled not only to obstruct the House investigation, but also to conspire with and coerce the government of Ukraine. Here's Graham at a news conference on January 24, 2020. What legitimate foreign policy interest could be served by having the president of Ukraine go on CNN and announce an investigation into one of the president's political rivals. What's the legitimate interest of the announcement? What Trump is frustrated with, including me, is that nobody in your business has spent 15 minutes telling us about what Hunter Biden did and is it good foreign policy.

He's frustrated because he believes there's a double standard. So I just don't buy the idea that it's wrong for the president to insist that the Ukrainians cooperate with us on an investigation. And I would say this. Two days later, the New York Times reported that John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, had directly witnessed and had documented in a book manuscript a meeting in which Trump opposed releasing the aid to Ukraine until Zelensky's government helped Trump's political allies investigate Biden and other

Democrats. Several Republican senators wanted Bolton to testify at the impeachment trial, but Graham worked behind the scenes to make sure that Bolton was never heard. In fact, in an interview on Fox News, Graham said that even if everything Bolton alleged was true, it wouldn't matter. Let's assume for a moment that John Bolton would say what the New York Times said he would say. The president told me to put a freeze on the aid because I want to look at the Bidens. I'm paraphrasing. The president had every reason to want to look at the Bidens. Basically, Graham was saying that it was OK for the president to seize power from Congress. It was OK to declare an emergency to take money for a border wall.

And it was OK to block military aid. Again, contrary to the express will of Congress, to coerce a foreign government to target Trump's political opponent. Whatever Trump did, whatever lines he crossed, whatever powers he claimed for himself, Lindsey Graham would back him up. On February 4th, 2020, as Republican senators prepared to formally reject and defeat the articles of impeachment, Graham celebrated. He gloated that Republicans had, in his words, kicked the butt of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in

the Senate. And Graham was even more boastful about the president. But the biggest winner of all by far is President Trump, because he comes out of this thing stronger. He's got more support today than he did before impeachment. And he's well on his way, I think, to getting a second term. Then came the retaliation. On February 7th, Trump began to purge the public servants who had told the truth about his extortion. By now, Graham was an expert in coming up with excuses for Trump's corrupt purges of public officials who got in his way. In 2017, Graham had defended Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. In 2018, he had defended Trump's firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And in January 2020, Graham had defended Trump's removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who had been targeted by Trump's agents in Ukraine

as an obstacle to their plot against Biden. When Graham was asked about the ouster of Yovanovitch, he shrugged that Trump could, quote, fire anybody he wants to. So on February 7th, when the White House expelled Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, who had testified about Trump's phone call and other elements of the Ukraine scheme, Graham again stood with the president. The expulsion was obviously vengeful. Vindman was ousted along with his brother, who also worked for the National Security Council, but unlike Vindman, hadn't testified. Both brothers were marched out of their offices by security guards. And what did Graham, a self-styled friend of the military, do about these expulsions? He went on TV and smeared Vindman. Graham said that people in Vindman's

chain of command were, quote, suspicious of him regarding his political point of view. Graham said that Vindman, not Trump, but Vindman, was being properly, quote, held accountable. And that was just the beginning. Graham was hellbent on continuing the purge. He called on the Senate to investigate Trump's enemies and track down the whistleblower who had revealed the president's extortion attempt. We're not going to let it go, said Graham. Who is the whistleblower? Does he have contacts on Schiff's staff? Did Colonel Vindman leak information to the whistleblower? It seemed that the war on Trump's enemies and on anyone who even dared to tell the truth about the president would never end. Graham was working his way through a transformation that became common among Republican politicians

during the Trump years. The first stage was selective toleration of the president's misconduct. The second was a gradual loss of will to resist him. The third stage was descent into a polarized worldview that made it easier to rationalize devotion to Trump. Graham had embraced that worldview in 2018 when he erupted in partisan rage at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. Now Graham was going to finish his conversion to the cult of Trump by retracting his previous heresies. He began by renouncing the entire Russia investigation. In 2018, Graham had acknowledged that the investigation, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, was well-founded and was being conducted responsibly.

In 2019, when Mueller issued his report, Graham had lied about it, pretending that Mueller had found no evidence of collusion or obstruction. But by 2020, Graham had fully crossed over into the cult of Trump. So he tried to rewrite the whole history of the investigation. On May 6, 2020, Graham declared that, quote, the entire Mueller investigation was illegitimate to begin with. On Twitter, he wrote, now I know why Mueller didn't find anything. There was nothing there to find. In fact, Graham claimed that the FBI and the Department of Justice

had known that there was nothing to find and that they had persecuted Trump anyway. Was there any legitimate reason for Mueller to be investigating the Trump team for a crime regarding Russia? In 2017, there was no evidence that anybody on the Trump campaign was working with the Russians. One by one, Graham went through the roster of Trump's accomplices, trying to exonerate them or minimize their crimes. Previously, Graham had acknowledged their corruption. But now, he would acknowledge nothing.

The most obvious example was Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor. In 2015, Flynn had been paid more than $45,000 by Russian state media for a speech at a gala in Moscow, where he sat right next to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Then in December of 2016, in phone calls with Russia's ambassador to the United States, Flynn had signaled that Trump, who had just been elected president with Putin's help, would relax American sanctions against Russia. It later turned out that during the 2016 campaign, Flynn had also been working secretly as a foreign agent for Turkey.

Graham knew that all these transactions were shady. In February of 2017, Graham had criticized Flynn for undercutting the sanctions. In May of 2017, he had criticized Trump's White House for not properly vetting Flynn's contacts with Turkey and Russia. Graham had praised Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, for telling Trump's White House lawyers about Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador. But later that year, after Trump was caught trying to squelch the FBI investigation of Flynn's contacts with the Russians, Graham began to shift his position. In December of 2017, he said Flynn's offer to the Russians to relax the sanctions was fine.

And Graham didn't stop there. By 2019, he had come around to the idea that the true villains were the American officials who had exposed Flynn's phone calls. Graham claimed that the U.S. intelligence community, which as part of its job routinely monitored the Russian ambassador's phone calls, including calls with Flynn or any other American, had no business surveilling Flynn or anyone else on Trump's transition team. Here's Graham in a live stream video for Trump's re-election campaign on May 25, 2020. He's talking with Lara Trump, the president's daughter-in-law.

The Obama administration apparently made a lot of requests to unmask conversations between the incoming National Security Advisor, General Flynn, and a Russian ambassador. Here's what scares the hell out of me. They have no business listening to the incoming administration. The incoming administration should be talking to world figures to set new policy. Why did all these people want to unmask conversations that General Flynn was having as he was waiting to become the new National Security Advisor? Was it for a legitimate national security purpose or were they trying to spy on the Trump campaign and figure out what they were going to do on national security front. That's why this- That's totally bonkers. Flynn's phone calls with the ambassador were in December of 2016. That's after the election was over. So there's no way that any American official who monitored

or reported those phone calls could have been, quote, spying on the Trump campaign. Later in the conversation, Graham made another bizarre statement. Here's what he said about Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump's 2016 campaign. Crossfire Hurricane was the name of the investigation that was opened up in 2016. It focused on four people, Carter Page, Papadopoulos, General Flynn, and Manafort. Manafort was charged with tax crimes. Not one of the four. Was there any evidence found to suggest that they worked with the Russians in any way during the campaign? Again, that's just nuts. Manafort was one of the three Trump campaign officials who had met with Russian emissaries at Trump Tower in June 2016

to listen to what had been presented by the Russian side in writing as an offer to, quote, provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary as, quote, part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump. Not only that, but Mueller's investigation found that during the campaign, Manafort had met with and had ordered the sharing of campaign documents with an associate who was connected to Russian intelligence. So Graham, in denying that Mueller had found any evidence of Manafort working with the Russians, was just flat-out lying.

Why? Why would Graham spout such complete garbage? What had happened to him? It's a complicated question, but if you actually sit down and watch the video he made with Lara Trump, you'll begin to see part of the answer. During their conversation, messages begin to appear across the bottom of the screen. The messages are advertising hats, t-shirts, and other merchandise

from DonaldJTrump.com. This is a fundraising video. Graham wasn't just a senator anymore. He was part of the Trump money machine. And that relationship was mutual. In the months after Republican senators acquitted the president in the Ukraine investigation, Graham used his alliance with Trump to solicit donations for his own re-election. Graham routinely went on Fox News and right-wing radio to ask viewers for money in the name of fighting for the president. Look at their face, and I've been consistently supporting President Trump because he beat me, and I want him to be successful. The unpardonable sin, Mark, is to support President Trump.

So the liberals hate me for Kavanaugh, they hate me for Trump. So what do I need? I need people listening to your radio show. If you can afford five or ten bucks, go to LindseyGraham.com and let's close golf classic. I don't mean to suggest that money was driving all of Graham's decisions. It wasn't. But it was part of a web that gradually corrupted Graham and other Republican politicians. Trump controlled what they needed. Endorsements, money, and Republican primary voters. By the spring and summer of 2020, Trump was in the cleanup stage of the Russia and Ukraine scandals. On the one hand, he was exacting vengeance against public servants who had stood up to him. But meanwhile, he was also determined to protect people who had remained loyal to him. And in some cases, that meant

blocking the justice system from punishing his accomplices, including those who had already been convicted of crimes. One was Roger Stone, who in 2016 had served as the chief conduit between Trump and WikiLeaks, which was Russia's partner in the operation to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and help Trump. In November 2019, Stone had been convicted of witness tampering, false statements, and obstruction of the congressional investigation into Russia's election interference. Trump was determined to pardon Stone, or at least to commute his sentence, so Stone would never go to jail. This was a totally corrupt arrangement. Stone had covered for Trump, and now Trump was paying him back. But Graham said it was all fine.

In February of 2020, Graham said Trump had, quote, all the legal authority in the world to pardon Stone. In fact, Graham claimed preposterously that Trump's unilateral power to pardon Stone was part of a, quote, brilliant and intricate system of checks and balances. In July, Trump did commute Stone's sentence. Graham applauded the decision. He said it was justified because the whole Russia investigation was, in Graham's words, biased and corrupt. Later, Trump gave full pardons, not just to Stone, but to Flynn and Manafort too. And once again, Graham backed him up. The pardons were a classic authoritarian move. They exploited a weakness in the Constitution, a virtually unchecked presidential power, to shield Trump's accomplices from the rule of law. By doing so, they also shielded the president, since the pardoned accomplices had

refused to testify against him. But the pardons were just tying up loose ends from Trump's previous crimes. The next stage of Trump's assault on democracy would go way beyond corruption. It would involve violence and the prospect of civil war. The violence began on May 25th, the same day Graham was recording that video with Lara Trump. It started in Minneapolis when police officers killed a black man, George Floyd, in the course of arresting him for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill. The killing, for which one officer was later convicted of murder, was captured on video and broadcast everywhere. In many cities, there were protests and riots. Trump responded by threatening to send in, quote, the unlimited power of our military. Graham supported the president's threat.

And three weeks later, as some people tore down statues in protest against police violence and other grievances, Graham called for a political war against the vandals and their sympathizers on the left. The people doing this hate our country. They hate the way we were founded. They hate capitalism. They have no respect for religion. They have no respect for diversity of thought.

These people, the most radical people known to America, were at war with them politically. They want to destroy America as we know it. They hate America and every symbol of our country from the flag to a statute. They hate. They want to turn us into a socialist nation. They want to destroy the family unit as we know it. And I tell you what, to the listeners out there, you may not believe you're in a war, but you are politically and you need to take sides and you need to help this president. When Graham talked about a war, he wasn't just talking about the vandals. He was talking about polarizing America in an all-out battle against

the Democrats. That fall, as Graham ran for re-election, he made the rounds on conservative radio and TV, raising money by vilifying liberals. They hate my friggin' guts, he bragged on Hannity's radio show. Let's kick their ass. That kind of rhetoric wasn't new, especially in the heat of a campaign. But this time, the political context was extremely dangerous. Trump was on the ballot too, and he was already signaling that if the election didn't go his way, he might not accept the outcome. Weeks before Election Day, Trump told his followers that massive election fraud was underway. The Democrats are trying to rig this election, because that's the only way they're going to win, he asserted.

When reporters asked the president whether he would accept the results and commit to a peaceful transfer of power, he refused to answer. There won't be a transfer, he said. There will be a continuation. But Trump's threats didn't bother Graham. In fact, Graham told voters that Trump's volatility was an asset. On October 31st, at a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, Graham bragged that Trump had scared the living daylights out of Mexico and China. Donald Trump has got everybody you want to be scared, scared. When I go overseas, they say, what do you think? I say, well, he's a little crazy. I watch what I do if I were y'all. That was three days before the 2020 election. The crowd had a good laugh at that line.

They loved the idea of Trump scaring other countries. But it wasn't Mexico or China that Trump was about to attack. It was the United States. Coming up next time on The Corruption of Lindsey Graham. Trump attempts a coup and Graham defends him by raising the threat of more political violence. We should reject post-presidential impeachments because it will destroy the country and it will incite violence. If you want to end the violence, end impeachment. The corruption of Lindsey Graham was reported and written by me, Will Salatan.

Katie Cooper is the producer, with audio engineering, editing, and sound design by Jason Brown. Thank you to my editors, Jonathan V. Last and Adam Kuyper, and to Charlie Sykes.