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In addition to Donald Trump and the 18 other individuals who were charged last month for their roles in attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, a special grand jury in the Peach State had also recommended that 21 additional supporters of the former president, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), should be indicted, according to a report unsealed Friday.
While 13 out of 21 grand jurors voted to charge him, Fulton County prosecutors ultimately decided to give Graham a pass. That means the senator avoided personally experiencing an outcome he had famously predicted in 2016, when he tweeted that the GOP would get destroyed if it nominated Trump.
If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016
In spite of his views at the time, Graham later became one of Trump’s main allies in the Senate and also fought by his side to overturn the election.
In another act of loyalty to the former president, the senator also did what he could to impede the investigation. He fought a subpoena that compelled him to testify before the grand jury all the way to the Supreme Court but ultimately lost.
Graham is not the only well-known name in the list of people who dodged an indictment even though grand jurors felt there was enough evidence to charge them.
That list also includes Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who served as Georgia’s senators at the time Trump staged his coup, as well as former national security adviser and noted conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn.
Graham didn’t seem overly appreciative of dodging accountability in this case.
He responded to the news of the grand jury’s vote by saying that his actions at the time were consistent with his job as senator and chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
“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,” Graham stated. “If it ever becomes impossible or politically dangerous or legally dangerous for a United States Senator to call up people to find out how the election was wrong, God help us all. The next election, if I have questions, I’ll do the same thing.”
Of course, the main thing that “went wrong” in Georgia, at least from Trump and Graham’s perspective, is that the former president lost a state in which Republicans had dominated until recently.
Graham’s main role in the effort to overturn Georgia’s election was to contact election officials in the state and press them on their recount voting procedures.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said at the time that Graham had “implied” that some votes could be thrown out.
The special grand jury recommended that the senator be charged in connection with his role in the “national effort to overturn the 2020 election” but not the other parts of the alleged conspiracy.
While prosecutors have not indicted Graham and the others yet, it seems possible that they might do so in the future.
