I want to play
what happened
on Saturday in Pickens, South Carolina.
Lindsey Graham,
who was one of Donald Trump's
most ardent
supporters, invited the former president,
the candidate to his home state,
and he was booed.
Listen to this.
Graham was booed.
I think you
thank you.
I come to like President Trump
and he likes himself.
And we got that in common.
And we love Senator We're going to act.
We're going to love him.
I know it's half and half,
but what I need
some of those liberal votes.
He's always there to help me get a book.
I'm not sure that was
that was helpful thing for Trump to say.
But as as you
come in and this
and bring in your reporting,
I just want to show
this is Pickens County, South Carolina.
Trump got 74.5% of the vote in 2020.
Lindsey Graham was right there with them
I mean just about the same.
So this is a place where Lindsey
Graham is very popular.
So it opens the question
of what you were talking about about
which is that
the people who are
at the core of the support
for Donald Trump
they want to hear his conspiracies
and Lindsey Graham
he supports a lot of things.
Donald Trump
he does not support the notion that 2020
was wrongly called.
He doesn't.
But he's also been all over the board
on everything from Trump.
If you think back to the timeline
of Lindsey Graham and Trump,
as you know well,
when he was running initially
in South Carolina.
Look, he it's one of the reasons
that Lindsey
Graham has embraced
President Trump
so often,
because he needs the support there.
I think a couple of different things.
Boos and audiences at Trump rallies
certainly are interesting,
but that is a corner of South Carolina
that's very close to Georgia.
We do not know how many South
Carolina voters were booing necessarily.
It's beside the point.
The reality here is that
it reminded me of going to
Kentucky sometimes and hearing
Republican voters
booed Mitch McConnell at Trump rallies.
They like Donald Trump.
They don't necessarily
like other Republicans.
Okay, fair point.
But Mitch
McConnell has very much separated himself
from Lindsey Graham.
And my question is,
if you're in South Carolina
and you have somebody who has embraced
almost everything
and actually endorsed Donald Trump,
and the only thing
that he doesn't support
Trump on is the 20, 20 election,
what does that say about the electorate
and about Trump supporters?
Well, Lindsey
Graham has been crosswise
with Trump as many times
as he has hugged him closely.
And so I think he's
sort of a complicated figure
on the right.
And I think
if you spend a lot of time
consuming conservative media,
they're very negative on Lindsey Graham.
He is he is mocked.
He is a boogeyman.
He is
he is not a beloved figure on the right.
And interestingly,
he's also not a beloved
figure on the left because
he has been booed
as president.
Biden mentioned him in a speech.
He's sort of this universal figure who,
for whatever reason, is
gets get people upset.
One of the one of the.
And we're going to take a quick break.
But I will just say that
one of the areas where they don't agree
is on Ukraine.
Yes.
And Graham is still in the McCain
the old McCain camp, which is that
you got to get in there
and you got to stay
and you got to defend democracy.
And Trump is now saying,
no, America first.
He's a hawk.
That is a hawk thing in the Republican
Yeah, that used to be a thing.
New details on the lengths
Donald Trump
went to pressure state officials
to overturn the 2020 election.
Remember this?
Then Arizona Governor Doug Ducey
turning down a call
with a Hail to the Chief ringtone
as he certified
his state's election results.
He later confirmed that he did
speak to Trump around
that time in late 2020.
CNN is now learning
more about exactly
what Trump wanted to talk to Doocy about.
CNN's Kristen Holmes joins me now
with her reporting.
Kristen, what are you hearing?
Yes.
So we did know, as
you said, about this phone call,
but it was never really clear
what exactly the two men talked about.
Doocy really kept quiet about it.
Now we are learning from sources
close to the situation.
We're familiar
with his private conversations
that behind closed
doors, the former
governor of Arizona said
that Trump was trying to pressure him
into finding some sort of voter fraud
to help
overturn the results of the 2020 election
in Arizona.
As you'll remember,
he lost by about 11,000 votes
in that state
and was remarkably surprised
by those results.
Now, we also learned
that Pence made several calls
to then-Governor
Ducey talking to him
about the election results,
although sources tell us
that he was not actually
pressuring Ducey,
he was asking him
to see if there was any voter fraud,
tell him that he needed to report it
appropriately.
It's so Pence was asked about that
this weekend. Here's what he said.
I did check in
with not only Governor Ducey,
but other governors in states
that were going
through the
legal process
of reviewing their election results.
But there was no pressure involved.
I passed along that information
to the president,
and it was no more no less than that.
Were you being pressured by Mr.
Trump
to get those to influence Doug Ducey?
And did you talk about this
with the special counsel?
No, I don't remember any pressure.
So the other thing to point out here,
we obviously have already known
about this
now infamous call
with Brad Raffensperger,
the secretary of state in Georgia.
That has been the subject
of the special counsel's investigation.
We have learned
that this call with Ducey
was not recorded
as that Raffensperger one was.
Also,
the special counsel has not reached out
to Doocy about this interaction.
But I do want to read you
a statement from his press secretary
this week.
He said,
The governor stands by his actions
to certify the election
and considers
the issue to be in the rearview mirror.
It's time to move on.
Well, this is significant
for a number of reasons, Dana.
One is that Donald
Trump is running for president again
and one of his core tenets
of his campaign
is that the 2020 election was rigged.
So while it might be
in the rearview mirror
for Doug Ducey,
who is now no longer
the governor,
it's not really in the rearview mirror
for the rest of the American people
when it comes to hearing this argument,
hearing this pushing time
and time again from the former president.
Yeah.
Despite and you know this
because you've reported
this despite the pleas
from inside his own campaign to move on
and stop talking about the past Chris.
And thank you so much for that reporting.
My panel is back now. And Tamara,
this extra data point about Arizona.
How is that going to play?
Is it
is it just part of a cake
that's baked politically?
Yeah, I don't know how it plays
in terms of an investigation,
but in terms of in terms of that cake,
yeah, it's pretty well baked.
People know that the former president
was calling around all over the place
searching for some way to win
an election that he lost
and his supporters
and even Republicans
who had said
that they were open to other people
are consolidating behind him
as he has faced indictment
because
he has found this way to make himself
a proxy for everyone's grievance or,
you know, if
if he's in trouble,
then they're in trouble.
And so they are coming to his defense.
And this is a candidate
who was a candidate back in 2016
won that race.
But while he was campaigning,
our case file has unearthed
something that he said November 5th 2016
at the time he was
referring to Hillary Clinton
we could very well
have a
sitting president under felony indictment
and ultimately a criminal trial
it would grind government
to a halt shoe need other foot.
Well this is a former president
that has long been contradictory
and sometimes he even jokes
openly about his own contradictions.
I think, though, that governor does.
His response to this is very telling.
Word to the governor
if he wanted to keep this secret,
maybe not tell a Republican donor
the donor class is pretty gossipy.
So that's why we all know about this now.
But he doesn't really seem
to want to engage in this anymore.
Through a spokesperson.
He said, listen,
that let's move on as a party.
And that's a big denial.
Didn't deny it.
But that's the tightrope that they
that they're walking here.
The this kind of conspiratorial politics
in Arizona
we saw was a real liability
where Republicans suffered some losses.
But at the same time, he doesn't want to
ding Trump.