Reckless Lindsey Graham Calls for Putin’s Assassination

CLAY: Craziness in the political arena. Lindsey Graham went on Sean Hannity’s show last night. I know many of you will be listening to Sean Hannity’s radio show right out of this show on many different affiliate stations across the country. But on Fox News last night, Lindsey Graham went on and said somebody in Russia should step up and take out Vladimir Putin.

Let’s listen to that, and then he’s also called for it again this morning. So we’ll listen to both of those. He’s doubling down on his hope that someone is going to assassinate Vladimir Putin. I want to see what the CIA man himself, Buck Sexton’s reaction to this is. I think there’s so many interesting dynamics at play in this discussion, but let’s start first, Fox News last night with Sean Hannity.

GRAHAM: What’s happened is that Putin looks at Biden, he sized him up, he thinks he can get away with it, and he’s going to keep going and going and going and nobody in the West is gonna stop him. How does this end? Somebody in Russia has to to step up to the plate. Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? This way this ends, my friend, is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out you would be doing your country a great service and the world a great service.

CLAY: All right. That’s on Sean Hannity. He doubled down on it again this morning earlier asking for people in Russia to assassinate Vladimir Putin. Buck, we have bombed countries historically that have talked about trying to assassinate our leaders. Iraq back in the day I remember for sure. This is pretty wild. It’s one thing to talk about it behind closed doors. It’s another thing basically to encourage it as a high-ranking official, like Lindsey Graham is, for a senator to say this and argue it last night and today. When you heard this your first thought as a former CIA guy was what?

BUCK: That Lindsey Graham is being reckless here.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: That this is not helpful in this moment. No one who has access to Vladimir Putin in Russia at that kind of level of thinking, “Oh, well, if Lindsey Graham thinks this would be a good idea…” I don’t know who… Actually I do know he’s spoking to. It’s people who have been caught up in the emotion of the moment, watching Lindsey Graham on TV and he gets to sound hawkish and tough on this issue at a time when being calculating and being risk averse are virtues.

Right now, we all want to just sit around and talk about the great victory of Ukrainians repelling the Russian invader. I feel that sentiment too. I don’t want us getting dragged into a war. I don’t want us getting in the middle of yet another conflict, especially one in which Ukraine is not a country that the U.S. has a direct national security interest in preserving as a democracy.

The sovereignty integrity of Ukraine is not something that is top of our list. I mean, there have been executive orders signed just on the legal side. It is an interesting legal question because are you trying to assassinate…? If you bomb Saddam’s palace and you think he’s there, is that an assassination attempt or in a military strike? There have been several executive orders, EO-12333 signed by Reagan. There was an executive order signed by Ford.

Usually specifically singling out the intelligence community ’cause they have concerns about this, and you go back to the era of JFK and Castro and the reports and stories about desire to assassinate Fidel Castro — which as we all know, those were not successful, and so you sit here and you wonder what exactly…? The people that would push for this… There’s the specifics of Lindsey Graham calling for it and then there’s what the outcome of it would be.

So we’ve addressed a little bit of what this this guy doing, a sitting U.S. Senator. And you know what? Let’s have him come on the show, actually. Lindsey Graham should come on the show and explain why he thinks this would be a good idea because you know what the first question I’d ask him is, “Okay, who takes over? Who do you think, Senator Graham, is all of a sudden in charge that’s so pro-Ukrainian, pro-Western, pro-NATO within the hierarchy?”

Russia is effectively a Mafia state-run by former KGB now turned into oligarchs who know each other, who work together, and are part of a top-down authoritarianism with Vladimir Putin at the very height of it. There’s not a bunch of people around him that have access in the security apparatus of Russia who are great democratic reformers who would end this conflict as far as we know. We’re not aware of this. He jails dissent, he jails…

Right now, Alexei Navalny, the most prominent Russian dissident, is in prison on a fraud charge — some trumped-up fraud charge — meant to send him way for 15 years. Who’s to say that the person who takes over after Putin would even be better? Putting aside for a moment the legality and ethics involved in a political assassination of a head of state that…

On the one hand, Clay, the administration, Biden administration is calling for diplomacy. And, on the other hand, you have people calling for no-fly zones; in this case, Lindsey Graham, an assassination. This is why it matters that we look at this very clearly and precisely and don’t get caught up in the emotions of the moment.

CLAY: I wonder so many additional thoughts that come to me when I hear those comments. First of all, I wonder — and I’m curious what you think about this — is Lindsey Graham freelancing, or has someone in the American intelligence community gotten to him and said, “Hey, we need to be making these arguments publicly, will you do it,” or do you think this is Lindsey Graham basically decide on his own, hey, this is what I believe?

Where do you think the impetus for this comment — because initially when I watched this on Hannity last night, I thought to myself, “Okay maybe he got ahead of himself.” Sometimes you go on television, sometimes you go on radio, and you say things and they don’t come out the way that you intend them and maybe he got fired up. But when he goes back on the next morning as we just played this morning and doubles down on it, it’s a clear intent.

I think he went on Sean Hannity’s show with the idea that he wants to make this argument. So where’s the impetus for you? Do you think to yourself, “Where is Lindsey Graham getting this idea?” Because I do. I wonder why is he doing it and who put him up to it or is he totally freelancing.

BUCK: I think there are people who would say that Lindsey Graham in recent memory has never seen a war he didn’t want someone else to fight. I think that is a criticism of him that is often leveled from even conservatives, that his position is default hawkishness. He’s one of these individuals who I think hasn’t learned very well the lessons of the last 20 years. He was a “stay as long as you have to,” a stay-forever Afghanistan guy.

He was a more-troops-in-Iraq guy. He’s been somebody who has taken that position over and over again. I was just wondering — and we should… He’s invited on. He’ll do other shows. He should do our show at some point. And of course, he’s a Republican senator. I think he loves his country and is a patriot and I’m not being disrespectful of Lindsey Graham but analyzing what he says but I do think this is an important moment for us to be very honest about the implications of something like that and how would someone feel…?

How would it look, Clay? China has people in concentration camps and for decades has had a one-child policy, has engaged in massive human rights abuses and is a totalitarianism. What would the reaction be if an American politician went on TV and called for any Chinese politician or Chinese leader to be assassinated? People, I think, would have a revulsion from that. I think that there’s been a demonization.

This is not to say that Putin is not even demonic, but there’s been a demonization of him in the public mind such that now people are already equating Hitler. “Everything is Hitler” is a problem we face in this country. Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler, okay? Vladimir Putin is somebody who presidents stretching back now for over 20 years have been sitting down with, engaging with, working with on certain issues, working against on other issues.

And to think about this in such simplistic — and I would say dangerous — terms in this moment when this conflict is really just getting going, we are opening phase is something everyone has to be really be on guard against. But I think this comes from Graham. I don’t think… The intel community, Clay, is basically a bunch of lawyers sitting around. The intel community is not… If you’ve watched James Bond, I wish. No one ever gave me a tuxedo. I had a lot of memos to write, a lot of lattes to drink.

CLAY: Here’s the other couple of things I think. One, you mentioned what if we said it about China. Imagine if the top Chinese official or top Russian official said, “Hey, we need to have Joe Biden assassinated?” This would be a monstrous story, plus, by the way, Russia has proven that they’re willing to attack people outside of their country — the KGB, the Russian intelligence agencies, however you want to classify these actions.

My immediate thought is, has Lindsey Graham put an incredible target on his back? And can you imagine the acceleration that we could create if Russia decided, “Hey, we’re gonna send a message to Lindsey Graham by trying to do something to him”? And all of this is, to me, the danger zone of representing acceleration, right?

We would, I think, and I think you probably agree, if we found a reliable assassination plot against Joe Biden that was being put together by North Korea, by Russia, by China, Iran, by somebody who is an enemy of the United States, we would take action in some way against them for that plot. How much different is it to have a top official encouraging other people inside of a country to kill the president? That is a major accelerant to me and it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s going to make things better at all.

BUCK: Well, it’s incitement to assassination which I think would be a step before conspiracy to assassinate, which is… We’ve actually seen that in the past. If I remember correctly — it’s been so many years now — one of the casus belli of the Iraq war was the belief at one point that they were going —

CLAY: They were gonna try to kill our president.

BUCK: They were trying to kill George H. W. Bush.

CLAY: That’s right, and then W. bombed them —

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: — to take action against them for that plot.

BUCK: Right. So, look, this is where you’re getting… There’s a lot of gray areas, as I said, with what’s a military target versus an assassination target, that’s gonna be something that we also see playing out in Ukraine right now with, oh, yeah, the Russians right now if the Russians could bomb a building with Zelensky inside of it, would they? I’m sure the answer is yes. So how different is that, really? But this is a moment where we have to remind ourselves, what are we trying to achieve?

I think this is where you take a step back and say, the people that are calling for a no-fly zone, the people that are… I think they can’t learn the lessons. The people that… I don’t know why they’re incapable of understanding what we’ve seen in the past but a no… We have never tried a no-fly zone against a combatant like Russia. That’s a totally new thing. A no-fly zone over Iraq? We weren’t worried the Iraqi Air Force.

We would be worried about the Russian Air Force as well as Russian nuclear capabilities on a whole other level here, so this is where we have to step back and remind ourselves: What do we want? Dare I say, “America First”? What do we want for our country in this turbulent time? And that’s how I think every problem should start from that. What does America want in this?

That might sound — it is at some level — harsh and there is something about it that doesn’t sit right with people because we’re seeing violence and thousands of civilians being killed in Ukraine. But it gets harder, and I knew this from the very beginning. It gets harder to maintain your principles on foreign policy as a cool and cold world continues to play out in front of you.