The late Senator Lindsey Graham once shared an emotional moment, revealing that he “almost cried” after the United States launched a military strike against Iran at the end of February.
The seasoned Republican representative from South Carolina made this candid remark while being filmed for a documentary focused on his mission to dismantle the Iranian regime and his efforts to convince President Donald Trump to initiate the strike, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Following the airstrikes in late February, Graham turned to the film crew, exclaiming, “Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried. How long have we been pushing this?”
Graham also conveyed to the crew that President Trump was pleased with the military action he played a role in initiating.
“I talked to Trump this morning, he’s excited. He said, ‘best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up,” the senator recounted.
Following the success, Graham had apparently also planned to try to persuade the president to join Israel in bombing Hezbollah sites in Lebanon – until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked him out of it, unreleased footage footage from the documentary shows.
The Israeli leader had warned that bringing the United States into the operation amid the Iran war was one step too far, too fast as the war in Iran was brewing.
‘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
Documentarian Alex Holder had unvarnished access to the South Carolina lawmaker
‘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.
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.
Graham had predicted the war in Iran would last only a few weeks