The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “threw Donald Trump under the bus” in testimony to a grand jury investigating election subversion in Georgia, a new book reportedly says, revealing that the former president would have believed “martians came and stole the election” he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the US supreme court to block his grand jury subpoena – and losing … Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus’,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write in Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, Politico reported.
“According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton county confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘that martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you’. He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”
The book, which cites “a source familiar with [Graham’s] testimony”, will be published next week.
Trump’s cheating at golf has been widely reported.
Isikoff and Klaidman also reportedly describe a “strange encounter” between Graham and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who has pursued the election subversion case, producing 13 criminal charges against Trump and charging a host of his allies.
Willis reportedly decided against charging Graham over his involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s win in the state.
“After Graham was finished testifying,” Isikoff and Klaidman write, “he bumped into Fani Willis in a hallway and thanked her for the opportunity to tell his story.
“‘That was so cathartic,’ he told Willis. ‘I feel so much better.’ Then, to the astonishment of one source who witnessed the scene, South Carolina’s senior senator hugged the Fulton county DA who was aggressively pursuing Trump.
“Willis’s reaction: ‘She was like, “Whatever, dude,”’ according to one witness of the strange encounter.”
Trump’s criminal charges in Georgia contribute to a total of 91, as do four federal charges concerning his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Biden.
The former president also faces 40 charges over the retention of classified information; 34 regarding hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an affair; civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”; and attempts to remove him from the ballot, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.
Nonetheless, he has dominated the Republican presidential primary, winning convincingly in Iowa and New Hampshire and now pressuring his last rival, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, to drop out.
Graham remains, in public, a vocal Trump supporter, oblivious to charges of hypocrisy given a famous 2016 prediction that Trump would “destroy” the Republican party, and given a claim, immediately after the attack on Congress, that he was finally “out” of Trump’s camp.
