The late Sen. Lindsey Graham reportedly recalled being so moved by the United States’ first strikes on Iran in late February that he “almost cried.”
The veteran South Carolina Republican made the remark while cameras were rolling for a documentary, as President Donald Trump initiated the military campaign known as Operation Epic Fury.
The documentary examines Graham’s long-running push to force a change in Iran’s leadership and his behind-the-scenes efforts to convince Trump to order attacks on the country, according to the Wall Street Journal.
As the late-February airstrikes unfolded, Graham addressed the documentary crew with visible emotion, saying, “Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried. How long have we been pushing this?”
Graham also told filmmakers that Trump was enthusiastic about the conflict he had helped set in motion.
“I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked,” Graham said, recounting the president’s reaction. “He said, ‘best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up.”
After the Iran strikes, Graham had reportedly intended to urge Trump to back Israel in targeting Hezbollah positions in Lebanon as well, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discouraged the move, according to unreleased footage reviewed by the Journal.
Netanyahu reportedly cautioned that drawing the United States into another front while the Iran war was intensifying would be too much, too soon.
‘We’re concentrating right now on Iran,’ Netanyahu said in a March 4 phone call that Graham had on speaker phone.
Lindsey Graham had encouraged President Donald Trump to first strike Iran in February
Graham had predicted the war in Iran would last only a few weeks
‘If we tell Hezbollah that we’re going all the way, we threaten them, but if we actually do it, then they have no reason not to go all the way against us. And right now, that’s not in our interest.’
Other scenes from the documentary by filmmaker Alex Holder showed Graham flying to meet with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to encourage him to get involved in the war efforts, meeting with other world leaders and expressing his thoughts on his fellow lawmakers in the months before he died at the age of 71.
It also documents Graham’s occasional frustrations with the Trump administration over the war efforts.
At one point in the film, the Republican sat down with Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor under former President Joe Biden, about the challenges he faced working with the Trump administration as negotiations continued in the Middle East.
‘I can’t do it with Jared and I can’t do it with Witkoff, they’re just too conflicted,’ he bemoaned of Trump’s special envoys in the negotiations, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
‘It’s got to be Rubio,’ Graham added of the Secretary of State.
A spokesperson for the White House, though, insisted to the Journal Graham, Witkoff and Kushner were close friends.
‘Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are excellent dealmakers whose results speak for themselves,’ the spokesperson said.
Documentarian Alex Holder had unvarnished access to the South Carolina lawmaker
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Graham expressed his frustrations with Trump’s special envoys, Jared Kusner and Steve Witkoff (pictured together in June)
In that conversation from March, Sullivan also asked Graham how long he expected the war was going to last.
‘In three to four weeks, we’re going to have them in a spot where they start losing control of some cities,’ Graham predicted, sharing his plan to ‘get Arabs more openly involved tomorrow’ at which point he said they would ‘have almost irreversible momentum.’
But Graham also described how he had to battle with ‘a lot of people’ who did not want Trump to start a war in Iran – and as the fighting raged on, the lawmaker expressed his frustrations that others in his party weren’t doing enough to support the war efforts.
‘Very few people are out selling this war from the administration. I’m shocked,’ he once told the film crew.
After President Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran in June, Graham bemoaned that even the president was becoming too wobbly on the war.
‘He’s letting this thing slip away,’ Graham told the film crew in his final interview from a bagel shop in Columbia, South Carolina. ‘I got to go talk to him.’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with United States Senator Lindsey Graham at his Jerusalem office in February
The lawmaker had described the commander-in-chief as ‘fun to be around’ and liked him, but understood Trump’s limits, Holder told the Journal.
Meanwhile, when Graham met with Israeli officials and Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – as they planned for the war in Iran, Graham was treated like a prime minister or a king, Holder claimed.
The filmmaker is now distilling hundreds of hours of raw camera footage for the documentary, currently titled Lindsey’s Game, which he said he wants to release in the coming months.
He said Graham had agreed to the plans, saying he wanted people to understand his career in the Senate and inspire others to work in government.
As he now looks back at his work, Holder said he noticed that the senator looked increasingly tired in the last few weeks of his life – but would say he didn’t have time to sleep.
When Graham then looked ‘absolutely disheveled and exhausted,’ Holder said the senator complained no one was helping him.
‘He’d say, “There’s no way I can die yet,”‘ Holder said.
The senator made a similar remark just hours before he died.
An unidentified person who spoke with Graham told Axios how he complained that he was feeling unwell.
When the individual urged Graham to seek medical attention immediately, the senator said he would do so on Sunday morning after his scheduled appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
He then joked, ‘I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russian sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization,’ according to the outlet.
