Lindsey Graham has defended himself after it was revealed that a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, recommended he and two former Republican senators be charged alongside former president Donald Trump.
“At the end of the day, nothing happened,” the US Senator from South Carolina said in the wake of the recommendations. “What I did was consistent with my job as being a United States senator, chairman of the judiciary committee. But it was just not me. Three US senators.”
Mr Graham was alluding to former Georgia Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, whom the grand jurors also voted to charge.
“We’re opening up Pandora’s box. I think the system in this country is getting off the rails. We have to be careful not to use the legal system as a political tool,” Mr Graham added, echoing a familiar complaint among Republicans of calling the judiciary “weaponised.”
The grand jury released its report on Friday about the evidence it heard in the case District Attorney Fani Willis brought against Mr Trump and 18 others for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
The report states that the trio were recommended to be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”. However, they were not ultimately charged.
Mr Trump and all 18 co-defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mark Meadows, have all pleaded not guilty to their 14 August indictments.
The report showed that 13 of the 21 grand jurors voted in favour of Mr Graham being indicted alongside other alleged conspirators for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Washington, DC.
However, seven grand jurors voted not to charge Mr Graham and one abstained.
Mr Trump weighed in on the report on Truth Social, saying it “has ZERO credibility and badly taints Fani Willis and this whole political Witch Hunt.”
The former president continued, “Essentially, they wanted to indict anybody who happened to be breathing at the time. It totally undermines the credibility of the findings, and badly hurts the Great State of Georgia, whose wonderful and patriotic people are not happy with this charade of an out of control ‘prosecutor’ doing the work of, and for, the DOJ. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
