South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said the impeachment trial will “be over by Sunday” after he lambasted the “cockamamie” and “absurd” evidence presented by his Democratic colleagues.
“This thing is collapsing before their eyes, and the not-guilty vote is growing, so it’ll be over by Sunday, I hope, for the good of country,” Graham told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday night.
“The not-guilty vote is growing after today,” he added. “I think most Republicans found the presentation by the House managers offensive and absurd. We all know what happened at the Capitol was terrible. I hope everybody involved that broke into the Capitol goes to jail, but I don’t remember any of these House managers saying a damn thing when they were trying to break into my house and going after Susan Collins and spitting on all of us.”
Graham appeared to reference a mid-September incident in which dozens of protesters banged on pots and pans outside of the senator’s Washington, D.C., home to “wake him up” in the dead of night. He also mentioned threats levied against Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“EVERY waitress who serves you is going to spit in your food, and that’s if you’re lucky, you f—— c—,” someone wrote in a letter to the lawmaker. Collins said her office received rape threats in addition to coat hangers, symbolic of makeshift abortions.
Former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial began on Tuesday after he was charged with incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection that saw thousands of his supporters descend on the Capitol, clash with law enforcement, and eventually breach the rotunda. Five people died during the siege, including one police officer.
On Wednesday, impeachment managers showed unseen footage of the attack, including body-worn camera footage of officers pepper-sprayed, hit with objects, and crushed in doorways.
“It was obviously very troubling to see the great violence that our Capitol Police and others were subjected to,” Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, an outspoken critic of Trump, said after watching the presentation. “It tears at your heart and brings tears to your eyes. That was overwhelmingly distressing and emotional.”
Graham, despite getting “mad” seeing how the chamber was breached, insisted the trial’s “evidence” was inconsequential.
“The managers have got this cockamamie idea, absurd theory, that Donald Trump is monitoring the Proud Boys website and other far-right websites and that he and [Trump campaign manager] Dan Scavino knew this was gonna happen and they encouraged it,” he told Hannity. “That is Looney Toons … because if the president didn’t know and it was actually preplanned, he’s not guilty.”
He went on to implicate Vice President Kamala Harris for past behavior during the riots that followed the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for over eight minutes.
“If this is a problem for a politician to give a speech like President Trump did, then Kamala Harris is a real problem because she actively engaged in bailing out rioters,” he said. “And here’s what I’d suggest: If you’re a politician trying to raise bail for people accused of rioting, you’re inciting more riots. But here’s something nobody’s talked about that’s important. If there was preplanning, there’s no incitement.”
Harris came under fire after the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which aided in releasing suspected rioters who were apprehended for alleged grievous crimes, bailed out a man accused of raping a child. The fund was also found to have released six men charged with serial domestic abuse crimes.
