“He was treated like crap”: Lindsey Graham booed for defending Brett Kavanaugh

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was booed by an audience at an ideas festival hosted by the Atlantic in Washington, D.C., after he once again raised doubts about the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and lamented the way the judge was treated at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.

“I thought she was handled respectfully. I thought Kavanaugh was treated like crap,” Graham said.

His comment immediately drew boos from the crowd, which drew an angry response from Graham.

“Well, boo yourselves,” Graham shot back.

During the interview at the festival, Graham said President Donald Trump was wrong for mocking Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony at a rally in Mississippi on Tuesday night. However, while Graham advised Trump not to mock Ford, he said that the substance of what Trump was saying was correct.

“Everything he said was factual; he’s frustrated his nominee has been treated so badly,” Graham said — a comment that led the moderator, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, to interject.

“Factual? It was a personal degrading attack on someone who’s a private citizen,” Goldberg replied.

“Well, you know here’s what’s personally degrading,” Graham replied. “This is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill. This is not the first time this has happened.”

The reference was to a quote from James Carville, who in 1996 made a similar comment about Paula Jones’ sexual assault allegation against then-President Bill Clinton.

“Sometimes people are accused of something they didn’t do,” Graham continued, after contextualizing his quote. “So President Trump went through a factual rendition that I didn’t like, and I would tell him to knock it off, you’re not helping. But it can be worse, you can actually kill somebody’s cat or puncture their tires to get them to shut up.”

Graham has been a vehemently vocal defender of Kavanaugh, and was the first Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to shun the female prosecutor that the GOP hired to question Kavanaugh himself.

“This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics,” Graham shouted during the hearing last week. “This is not a job interview. This is hell.”