Southern Baptist senator Lindsey Graham said Thursday he doesn’t expect on Judgment Day to be asked to give an account for why he voted to acquit in the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
“When I go to meet God at the pearly gates I don’t think he’s going to ask me, ‘Why didn’t you convict Trump?’” the South Carolina Republican said on the Brian Kilmeade Show on Fox News Radio.
Sen. Lindsey Graham
“I may be wrong, but I don’t think that’s going to be on the top of the list,” said Graham, a member of Corinth Baptist Church in Seneca South Carolina. “I’ll have a lot to answer for, but this was clearly an effort to destroy Trump.”
Graham also discussed fellow Republican Sen. Mitt Romney’s vote to convict in the president’s impeachment trial. Romney, a Mormon, said he was abiding by an oath he made to God.
“All I can tell you is that God gave us free will and common sense,” Graham said. “I used the common sense that God gave me to understand this was a bunch of B.S.”
“It was politically driven,” Graham said of the impeachment process. “It was driven by people who are not looking for the truth. They hate Trump. They were going to impeach him the day he got elected, and if you can’t see through this, you know, your religion is clouding your thinking here.”
Graham also addressed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spectacle of ripping up a copy of the president’s State of the Union address in front of cameras covering the Senate hearings. Pelosi, a Catholic, denounced the speech as “a manifesto of mistruths.”
Graham called it “a petty, small, political gesture designed to ingratiate herself to the most radical socialist members of her party.”
“I think it’s going to backfire,” he said.
Graham, who served four terms in the House of Representatives before joining the Senate in 2002, ranked Trump’s State of the Union as the best he has heard during his time in Washington. He called his vote to acquit the president “the easiest decision I have ever had to make.”