South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told Axios that he was one of the people who talked former President Donald Trump out of doing a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 6, the anniversary of the Capitol riot.
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- Sen. Lindsey Graham is taking credit for talking Trump out of doing a press conference on January 6.
- Trump was initially scheduled to hold an event at Mar-a-Lago on the anniversary of the Capitol riot.
- Graham said he told Trump that “there could be peril in doing a news conference.”
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is taking credit for talking Trump out of holding a press conference on January 6, the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection.
In an interview with Axios on Tuesday night, Graham said he was among several people, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who encouraged Trump to ax the event.
Trump had announced in December that he planned to host an event on January 6 to talk about how the “insurrection took place on November 3rd.” The former president continues to insist that the January 6 insurrection was a “completely unarmed protest of the rigged election.”
Graham, according to Axios, regularly plays golf with Trump and spoke to Trump about canceling the press conference during a match over the weekend.
When Trump brought up the now-canceled press conference, Graham said he told the president “there could be peril in doing a news conference” and that it was “best to focus on election reform instead,” according to Axios.
House and Senate leaders were “quietly relieved” after Trump released a statement on Twitter on Tuesday through his spokeswoman Liz Harrington, calling off the January 6 event.
In his statement on Tuesday, Trump blamed the abrupt cancellation of the event — initially slated to be held at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida — on “the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media.”
Per Trump’s statement, the former president now plans to talk about January 6 at a rally scheduled for January 15 in Arizona. It will be Trump’s first rally of 2022.
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