Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is a lawyer, so he should know legal outcomes depend on the facts of each case, and no two cases are exactly alike. This is basic stuff they teach to law students.
Last weekend, Graham went on Fox News to say, to an already-inflamed audience that shouldn’t be hearing this kind of talk from political leaders, “I’ll say this, if there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there will be riots in the street.”
Needless to say, he came under a hail of criticism for that remark, including from President Biden (see story here). There were even calls, albeit partisan, to expel him from the Senate (see story here).
Graham, in response, didn’t exactly walk back his remark. Instead he tried to explain it. “What I tried to do was state the obvious,” he told CNBC. “Here’s what I said, the raid on President Trump’s home, the likely nominee for 2024, better bear some fruit here. If it’s just about mishandling classified information, we’ve had a standard set when it came to Hillary Clinton.”
He continued, “Our country, the people on our side, believe that when it comes to the justice system, there are no rules regarding Trump, [it’s a case of] ‘get him, it doesn’t matter how you get him,’ so I said that if it’s similar to what happened to Clinton and he gets prosecuted, it’ll be one of the most disruptive events in America.”
Experts who’ve weighed on in the issue say the Clinton and Trump cases aren’t comparable (see story here). And Graham’s disparagement of the justice system is just plain baseless and inappropriate.
Here’s something else Graham, as a lawyer, should know: There comes a time when you ought to just shut up, because if you keep running off at the mouth, you’ll only dig yourself in deeper. Although Graham was a military lawyer, he was never in private practice, so he probably never had the experience of kicking a client under the table during a deposition. So maybe he has yet to learn this.