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South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham threatened the White House that if former President Donald Trump did not condemn his supporters at the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol he would call for him to be removed from the presidency.
That is the claim of a new book, of which an excerpt was shown on Wednesday, The Daily Mail reported.
Graham, among the ex-president’s staunchest supporters in Congress, reportedly even hoped the insurrection would be a catalyst for the GOP breaking free of Trump.
He expressed that then-President-elect Joe Biden was the right person to lead the country amid the political tumult following the 2020 presidential election, according to the forthcoming book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.
If Trump did not condemn the Capitol rioters on stronger terms, an ‘enraged’ Graham told White House counsel Pat Cipollone on January 6, then ‘we’ll be asking you for the 25th Amendment,’ reports from the book obtained by Axios read.
The 25th Amendment, which outlines presidential succession, gives the vice president and Cabinet the power to remove the commander-in-chief from office via majority vote. It has never been invoked in U.S. history.
He said to the authors of the book that he wanted to see the riot cause the Republican Party to break from the former president.
“People will say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with that,’ he said. “’There will be a rallying effect for a while, the country says: We’re better than this.”
And of President Joe Biden he offered praise when he said, “I mean, how mad can you get at Joe Biden?”
In January the senator took sides against the former president and said that he was “inappropriate” for suggesting that some of those behind bars for their role in January 6 could be pardoned.
At his “Save America” rally in Texas, Trump suggested he would perhaps pardon some of the people involved in the riot at the Capitol.
“If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” he said to a cheering crowd.
Dozens of people arrested shortly after entering the Capitol remain in custody a year later, having been denied bail and with no court date yet scheduled.
“If that requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly,” the former president noted.
“This hasn’t happened to all of the other atrocities that took place recently, what that un-select committee is doing and what the people are doing who are running those prisons — it’s a disgrace,” he argued. “We will treat them fairly and we will take care of the people of this country.”
Graham responded to the former president’s thoughts a day later.
“I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol. There are other groups with causes that may want to go down to the violent path that these people get pardoned,” he told CBS News’ “Face The Nation.”
“Yeah. Well, I think it’s inappropriate. I don’t want to reinforce that defiling the Capitol was OK. I don’t want to do anything that would make this more likely in the future.
“And just let me finish my thought here. When Kamala Harris and her associates and the people that work for her, her staffers, raised money to bail out the rioters who hit cops in the head and burned down stores.,” he said.
“I didn’t like that either. So I don’t want to do anything from raising bail to pardoning people who take the law into their own hands because it will make more violence more likely. I want to deter people who did what … on January the 6th. And those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it,” the senator said.
Trump responded to Graham’s statements in an interview with Newsmax TV’s Rob Schmidt.
“Well, Lindsey Graham’s wrong. I mean, Lindsey’s a nice guy, but he’s a RINO. Lindsey’s wrong,” Trump said after the host asked him his opinion of the South Carolina Republican’s remarks.
“I would absolutely be prepared, and Lindsey Graham doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, if he says that, because you have to have equal justice,” Trump added. “It’s very, very unfair what’s happened to this group of people.”
