Lindsey Graham was the Republican senator from South Carolina who served, throughout John Kiriakou’s commentary, as the standing personification of Washington’s war party. He died suddenly in July 2026. Kiriakou devoted the first episode of his own show to him, and returned to him in the fifth when previously unseen documentary footage surfaced.
Show horse
Kiriakou’s organising distinction for Congress is between workhorses and show horses. A workhorse “actually writes legislation and is a substantive expert on something”; a show horse “just runs in front of the nearest camera and bloviates about whatever happens to be in the news.” Graham, in his reading, was the second kind — and the verdict he offers is unsentimental: “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but Lindsey Graham has so much blood on his hands over the last 30 years that I don’t think we should be celebrating him.”[1]
The other recurring word is chameleon — a term Kiriakou says he has used for Graham repeatedly over the years. “Whatever happened to be in vogue, whatever foreign policy goal happened to be popular, there was Lindsey Graham.”[2] Beneath the shifting positions he identifies one constant: “If there was one thing that Lindsey Graham loved, loved, loved more than anything else, it was war.” A lieutenant colonel in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s office, Graham “never saw a war that he didn’t want to jump into with both feet” — Kiriakou’s list runs Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza. “He loved them all.”[3]
The spending followed. Graham was among the loudest proponents of an inflated defense budget — already a trillion dollars, “more than the next nine largest countries combined,” and Graham wanted to raise it by half in a single year. Kiriakou sets that against Graham’s own state: “He didn’t care if children were starving. He didn’t care that his state was near the bottom of the entire collection of 50 states in public education.”[4] As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and number two on both Appropriations and Judiciary, he also played a leading role in pushing Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees through.[5]
The Netanyahu back channel
What made Graham consequential, in Kiriakou’s account, was not his committee seats but his phone. He was “one of the few lawmakers with direct personal access” to both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and “often served as an unofficial back channel between Washington and Jerusalem.” Kiriakou’s qualifier is blunt: “Graham was so pro-Israel as to be irrational.”[6] By many accounts, he adds later, Graham spoke with Netanyahu more often than with some senior US officials.[7]
The habit extended to live television. Kiriakou describes Graham in the Meet the Press green room, on the phone with Netanyahu, “asking if there was any information that he could reveal on the air.” His death, Kiriakou says, “is an enormous potential gift for the people of Gaza.”[8]
The Hiroshima argument
The clip Kiriakou plays as representative has Graham reasoning from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Israel’s present war — that the United States ended one existential conflict with nuclear weapons, and Israel should therefore be given “the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose.”[9]
Kiriakou takes it apart on both the history and the logic. On the history: “historians are unanimous now that it was not necessary for the United States to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was essentially over.” A ground war would have been required, but “the Japanese were broken,” and the Soviets were advancing from the north. He calls the decision political, “and it was a terrible one” — more than a hundred thousand people “vaporized,” plus tens of thousands of later cancers from the fallout.[10][11]
On the logic, he follows the permission structure to its end: if it is acceptable for the United States and then for Israel, “then why wouldn’t it be okay for the Russians to use nuclear weapons or the Chinese or the Indians and the Pakistanis, the French for that matter, the British? It would usher in an entire new world. It’s insanity.”[12][13]
The death
Graham died on a Saturday night at his home on Capitol Hill, hours after returning from a trip to Kiev — he was among the Ukrainian government’s strongest supporters in the Senate. Medical examiners gave the cause as a perforated aorta; he had undiagnosed arteriosclerosis, and the immediate event was a massive heart attack.[14]
Kiriakou emphasises how abrupt it was. Hours earlier Graham had been speaking with Trump and preparing to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press the following morning: “He was booked and then suddenly he was dead.” Trump went on in his place.[15]
The final phone call, per reporting Kiriakou walks through, was to Trump that Saturday night — Graham briefing him on Kiev and on the Russia sanctions bill he wanted the Senate to vote on. Trump told him he was preparing fresh strikes on Iran. Someone who spoke to Graham just after the call said he complained of feeling unwell and was urged to seek medical attention immediately; Graham said he would do it Sunday morning, after Meet the Press. He then joked: “I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israel-Saudi normalization.” Kiriakou’s line: “And then he dropped dead two hours later.”[16][17]
What the death changed
Kiriakou counts three vacancies. Israel lost its most vocal supporter in Congress; Ukraine lost its most vocal supporter; and the Republican party lost “what amounted to a Trump whisperer, somebody who had Donald Trump’s ear and who could convince him to do things.”[18] On the war itself, though, he expects nothing to move: Trump “has his policy,” “has made up his mind,” and retains Republican support in both chambers. “But he did lose a serious cheerleader in Lindsey Graham.”[19]
He also flags the seat itself. Graham’s sister was appointed to fill out the remainder of the term and announced a run for a full one — “Her only qualification is that she was related to Lindsey Graham. That’s it. It says a lot about the current state of American politics, doesn’t it?”[20]
Against the whitewash
Within days, Kiriakou observed, the obituary tone flipped — from “Lindsey Graham was a real war hawk” to “he was this great statesman and we love him.” He rejects the turn outright: “let’s not whitewash who these people are. They’re the very definition of war criminals, and they think that they can demand constant war and there will be no fallout.”[21]
His forecast for the legacy is that there will not be one. “Ten years from now, nobody’s going to remember who Lindsey Graham was. And those who do will see him as an embarrassment to our country.” The use he predicts is cautionary — an example given “to military school students, as someone that you should never let get within 10 feet of a president of the United States.”[22]
The posthumous portfolio
Graham’s death, in Kiriakou’s phrase, meant “his work portfolio has essentially been revealed.”[23] An Axios reporter who had been close to him published what amounted to his dying wishes, including a proposed settlement architecture for the region built around the Saudi crown prince.
Kiriakou reads the sourcing as obvious: “It’s pretty clear Lindsey Graham is the source… Lindsey Graham has said these things publicly using the same language, the same lingo, the same word structure.”[24]
The plan’s centrepiece was Saudi-Israeli normalization — “the crown jewel of the so-called Abraham Accords,” valuable not only because Saudi Arabia is the largest state on the peninsula but because it is “the land of the two holy mosques… the very beating heart of Islam.”[25][26] The timetable was tight: an intensive diplomatic push after Israel’s October elections and the US midterms, aiming to close before the new Congress was sworn in in January.[27]
First, though, Graham wanted the Strait of Hormuz crisis contained, and had urged Trump to authorise “a short overwhelming military operation” to force it open if diplomacy failed. Kiriakou’s comparison is deflating: “That sounds like the old troop surge that we initiated in Iraq — and which also failed.”[28]
On the underlying premise of a short war, he is harsher still. Graham had “a lifetime of military experience” and still believed a country of nearly 93 million people, “the size of the whole of Western Europe, and with the support of Russia and China, can be brought to defeat in a day or two, a week, or a month.” “That’s how we got into 20-year-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because we listened to idiots like Lindsey Graham.”[29]
The Alex Holder tapes
Two weeks after the death, footage surfaced from documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who had been granted extensive fly-on-the-wall access to Graham since 2023 — “every facet of his, well, almost every facet of his life, including phone calls that probably should have been, probably were actually classified.”[30] Kiriakou’s aside on why a senator would agree to that is characteristic: under normal circumstances “you could not have paid me enough money to watch hour after hour of Lindsey Graham on the phone with his friends. That’s probably why Lindsey Graham thought, ‘Ah, screw it.’”[31]
Offering the Air Force
The first clip is a call with Netanyahu on the day the bombing of Iran began — Graham opening with “I’m just so impressed. Glad to be your friend” and then offering to lobby the president to “join with y’all in Lebanon, to maybe fly some with you.” Netanyahu declines the idea on tactical grounds, and Graham accepts the correction: “that’s actually good counsel.”[32][33]
Kiriakou’s reading is that a sitting senator volunteered American air power against a country the United States was not at war with, unprompted: “He’s offering up the US Air Force to bomb a country with which we are not at war” — and in this instance the Israelis “actually don’t” want it.[34]
”Three to four weeks”
The second clip is Graham forecasting the war: three to four weeks to have Iran “in a spot where they start losing control of some cities,” a few cities falling within the month, Arab governments drawn in openly, and then “almost irreversible momentum.”[35]
Kiriakou pulls two things from it. The first is who is on the other end of the line — Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser and a leading candidate for Secretary of State in a future Democratic administration. “This is not a partisan issue… The Democrats are in with both feet just like the Republicans are.”[36]
The second is the house-of-cards fantasy — Netanyahu’s line that Iran would simply collapse, that the Shah’s son would return, that “it’s going to be the land of milk and honey… they’re going to be waving little American and Israeli flags.” Kiriakou: “Anybody who knows anything about the Middle East could have told him that he was just plain wrong.” The actual effect, he argues, was the reverse — “we’ve driven Iranians together. And now the Iranians are united against us, against Israel, and against our Arab allies.”[37][38]
The historical analogy he reaches for: “Imagine if years after the invasion of Iraq, we discovered footage of Dick Cheney casually telling his friends that Saddam would be gone in a couple of weeks and the entire Middle East would just fall into place."[38]
"Lindsey Graham committed espionage on camera”
The charge Kiriakou builds from the tapes is a legal one, and he builds it out of his own case. The Espionage Act was written in 1917 against German saboteurs and never meaningfully updated — lightly amended in 1950 after the Rosenberg executions, and still containing no mention of classified information, because the classification system did not exist until the 1950s. It refers only to “national defense information,” which it never defines.[39]
His own prosecution supplied the working definition. Judge Leonie Brinkema — “a hanging judge appointed by Bill Clinton” — defined espionage as “providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it. That’s it.”[40]
Applied to the tapes, the conclusion follows mechanically: “Lindsey Graham was talking classified defense strategy in his phone call with his buddy BB, and there were uncleared documentary filmmakers in the room. That’s espionage. Lindsey Graham committed espionage on camera.”[41]
Shouting at the screen
Kiriakou says he will now force himself to watch the documentary, and reaches for a memory from Pakistan after 9/11 to explain how. Working seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, the one relief was Wednesday movie night in the ambassador’s small theatre at the embassy, where the staff would shout and throw popcorn at whatever film they could get hold of. “That’s how I feel about Lindsey Graham. I’m going to shout at the screen — we don’t want you, Lindsey Graham. We don’t care that you died. Just go and let us be."[42][20]
"But he’s got rights”
Before the death, Graham starred in one of Kiriakou’s free-speech set pieces, delivered amid the post-Charlie Kirk firings debate: Graham angers people daily, and if something happened to him Kiriakou wouldn’t blame the victim — “he’s a despicable human being, but he’s got rights” — and firing people for saying things we don’t like is wrong.[43][44]
The militarist whisperer
On Ukraine, Kiriakou had long described Trump as squeezed by “militarist forces” — “he’s got Lindsey Graham and people like that breathing down his neck.” The choice as he framed it: “Do I want my Nobel Peace Prize, or do I want to suck up to Lindsey Graham?”[45][46] He listed Graham with Richard Blumenthal among those piling on for deeper involvement,[47] noted Graham’s early enthusiasm for Ukraine’s minerals,[48] and predicted that as the neoconservative line reasserted itself, “Lindsey Graham is going to become the old Lindsey Graham again — as horrible as that sounds.”[49] In the corporatist duopoly he describes, Graham filed under “lackeys.”[50]
Workhorses and showhorses
John Kiriakou has long divided Capitol Hill into two kinds of member: the workhorse, who writes legislation and is a substantive expert on something, and the showhorse, who “just runs in front of the nearest camera and bloviates about whatever happens to be in the news.” He places Graham squarely in the second category.[51] He also calls him a chameleon — whatever foreign policy goal happened to be popular, “there was Lindsey Graham.”[52]
Graham served as a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Office and, in Kiriakou’s account, “never saw a war that he didn’t want to jump into with both feet” — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza alike.[53] He was among the biggest proponents of an inflated defence budget, seeking a 50 per cent increase in a single year on top of a budget already at one trillion dollars, more than the next nine largest countries combined, while his state sat near the bottom of the fifty in public education.[54] As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and number two on both Appropriations and Judiciary, he also played a leading role in confirming Supreme Court nominees.[55]
Backchannel to Jerusalem
Kiriakou describes Graham as one of very few lawmakers with direct personal access to both the president and Benjamin Netanyahu, which made him a foreign policy player automatically and gave him a role as an unofficial backchannel between Washington and Jerusalem.[56] By his account Graham would sit in the Meet the Press green room on the phone with Netanyahu, asking whether there was anything he could reveal on the air.[57]
Unfinished business
Graham spent his final weeks laying groundwork for a push to normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel — in Kiriakou’s framing, the crown jewel of the Abraham Accords.[58] The plan was to begin an intensive diplomatic effort after Israel’s October elections and the US midterms, aiming to reach a deal before the new Congress was sworn in in January, with the war with Iran brought under control first; he had urged the president to authorise a short, overwhelming operation to force the Strait of Hormuz open if diplomacy failed.[59] Kiriakou compares that prescription to the Iraq troop surge, which also failed.[60]
On the Saturday night he died, Graham spoke with the president by phone about his Ukraine trip and a Russia sanctions bill, complained afterwards to a companion that he was not feeling well, and said he would seek medical attention on Sunday morning after finishing his appearance on Meet the Press. He then joked: “I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israel-Saudi normalization.” He was dead roughly two hours later.[61][62]
Kiriakou expects the war in Iran to continue unchanged, the policy being the president’s rather than Graham’s — but he grants that the war lost “a serious cheerleader.”[63]
The funeral as a summit
Graham’s funeral in Washington, held in late July 2026, became in John Kiriakou’s account a working meeting rather than a memorial. He walked viewers through the footage: Benjamin Netanyahu on the left, President Zelensky on the right, both speaking to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the centre, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arriving later. “It’s it wasn’t just a funeral. It was a meeting of the minds… It was a real who’s who of what we’re going to call maximus maximalist US foreign policy.”[64][65]
What Zelensky and Netanyahu had in common, he observes, is that “They both want more and more and more American missiles.” The body language he treats as substantive: Netanyahu ends up wagging his finger at Rubio and Hegseth, “a wildly unpopular one, at that, on camera, appearing to lecture the American Secretaries of State and Defense”, while Rubio “does this little spin to look away as Netanyahu’s talking. Everything is done for a reason at these levels.”[66][67]
Reza Pahlavi also attended.[68]
The ICC recordings
Graham is also the central figure in the recordings Kiriakou calls the most revealing evidence of Israeli capture of American officials — see Graham–Netanyahu ICC tapes. Kiriakou’s framing of why he keeps returning to Graham: “We have given Lindsey Graham a lot of airtime on the show the last 2 weeks, but I truly cannot think of a more revealing person as far as how Benjamin Netanyahu captured US officials and anyone sympathetic to his cause.”[69]
The casualness of it
What Kiriakou fixes on in the recordings is not the substance but the register. Reviewing the exchange in which Graham offers to gather Democratic co-signers and floats the Speaker of the House as the ideal name, his instruction to the listener is to attend to the tone: “Did you catch how casual their tone was? Let me brainstorm some Democrats we can get to cosign.” His judgement is that there was no strategy behind the operation at all — the object was a strongly worded letter, “a bunch of important people to sign it, and hope for the best.”[70][71]
He treats Graham as the most revealing available illustration of a general phenomenon — the capture of American officials sympathetic to Netanyahu’s cause — rather than as an isolated case.[72]
Joint Base Lindsey Graham
Within days of Graham’s death the Defense Department named a military installation after him: Joint Base Lindsey Graham. John Kiriakou, whose views on the senator he describes as well known, noted the speed of it — “Lindsey Graham just died what, like the other day, and the Defense Department already named a military base after him.”[73][74]