Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used to hang out with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), and people assumed that he was as honorable as, perhaps the most patriotic man in Congress. We were so tragically wrong. He is just a chameleon basking in the personality of his current best friend. Now, the empty vessel named Graham is interfering in the Georgia presidential election.
A staffer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger announced he had been part of the phone call between his boss and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) begged to differ with the South Carolina senator. He participated in the controversial phone call and indicated that heard Graham ask if state officials could throw out ballots.
Raffensberger said that the South Carolina senator called him and told him to look at absentee ballots that went heavy for Biden. Earlier, CNN reported Raffensberger claimed that Graham had told him to:
‘[L]ook hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’
Of course, Graham denied the charge calling it “ridiculous” that he would pressure the Georgia secretary of state to throw away “legally cast ballots.” When confronted by reporters, he said that he was calling about “verified signatures.” He added that he was suggesting the Raffensburger change from having one person verify the signature to a “bipartisan team.” Then, if there was a disagreement, they might set up some mechanism to decide:
‘The future hangs in the balance.’
Raffensberger’s Election Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling said he was participating in the call between the secretary and Graham. He corroborated his boss’ earlier statement.
Sterling responded to a CNN reporter on Tuesday:
‘What I heard was basically discussions about absentee ballots and if a potentially … if there was a percentage of signatures that weren’t really, truly matching, is there some point we could get to, we could say somebody went to a courtroom could say well, let’s throw (out) all these ballots because we have no way of knowing because the ballots are separated.’
Sterling was referring to tossing absentee ballots that had already by considered legal by the local officials counting and verifying them:
‘There is no physical ability for this office to do anything along those lines. If somebody wanted to go that route, they could go the court route.’
Sterling noted that what Graham had to say “might have gone a little to the edge of” the acceptable. Then, he added that he could see why the two men interpreted the event differently.
Ever the politician, Sterling said “Our job is to follow the law:”
‘The President is going to continue to fight, his supporters continue to fight. Our job is to continue to follow the law, and we were answering process questions… that’s what we were doing on the call.’
