Kaitlan Collins Stunned by Unearthed Lindsey Graham Footage
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins couldn’t hide her astonishment after playing never-before-seen documentary footage of Lindsey Graham instructing Benjamin Netanyahu on how to fight war crimes accusations.
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During Thursday’s episode of The Source, audio recorded by British filmmaker Alex Holder for a planned documentary about the late South Carolina senator showed Graham strategizing with the Israeli prime minister on how to persuade lawmakers to denounce the International Criminal Court as it investigated him for alleged crimes against humanity.
In the October 2024 clip, in which only Graham’s side of the conversation could be clearly heard, the Republican joked that Netanyahu should “pay me for all this. I should get tons of shekels” for helping the Israeli leader secure bipartisan opposition to the ICC probe.
In November 2024, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes committed during the war in Gaza against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
During the call, Graham told Netanyahu how he could get two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ben Cardin of Maryland, to sign a letter demanding an investigation into sexual harassment allegations against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, in an effort to undermine the ICC’s war crimes investigation.
“But I do need you, if you don’t mind tomorrow, to call Blumenthal and Cardin, and thank them for being fair-minded on this, and also thank them for trying to help with Saudi-Israel normalization,” Graham said.
“You appreciate it. You’re very interested in it. That will encourage both of them.”
After playing the clip, a visibly stunned Collins simply responded, “Wow,” before asking Holder what he made of the footage.
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“What was interesting was Sen. Graham was instructing the prime minister what to do,” Holder said.
“It also showed that he sort of felt that he was owed one, in the sense of ‘I’m sort of scratching your back, you scratch mine,’ and that for him was Saudi-Israel normalization. He was really pushing that. He was really trying to get the prime minister to come on board and do what he needed to do to make that deal happen.”
Graham, who died on July 11 at the age of 71, was one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress and spent years calling for the U.S. to go to war with Iran.
In November 2024, Cardin and Blumenthal signed a bipartisan letter demanding an investigation into the allegations against Khan, weeks before the ICC issued its arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Khan was removed from his position by the ICC’s oversight body on July 24 following a nearly two-year investigation into the sexual harassment allegations.
Speaking to Collins, Holder said Graham’s close relationship with Netanyahu showed that the late senator had an “enormous impact” on geopolitical issues, “in some ways, more than domestic.”
“The respect I think that he got from other leaders was fascinating to witness,” the filmmaker said. “The calls that he would get from other senators or from other leaders around the world to help them on their various issues was really quite unbelievable to capture and to see. The access really was extraordinary, and he allowed us to peek behind the curtain.”
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