If disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez were to get a pardon from President Donald Trump, something he’s publicly angling for, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), a longtime Menendez friend who is also a close Trump ally, might be the most obvious conduit for it to happen. But Graham says that he hasn’t had any conversations about the possibility of a pardon.
“I don’t know,” Graham said this afternoon when asked by the New Jersey Globe whether he thought a pardon might be in the works. “I haven’t talked about it or asked about it.”
During Menendez’s many years in the Senate, he and Graham were close enough that Graham testified as a character witness at Menendez’s first corruption trial in 2017. “I’m not here because I agree with him or disagree with him. I’m here because I know him,” Graham said at that trial, which ultimately ended in a mistrial. “In very difficult circumstances, he always keeps his word.”
Graham is also an influential Trump confidant, despite initially being a vociferous Trump skeptic during the 2016 presidential campaign, meaning that he could be an ideal intermediary for Menendez’s pleas to reach the president’s ears.
But Graham said today that he hasn’t spoken recently with Menendez, who was convicted of a wide-ranging bribery scheme last summer and sentenced to 11 years in prison in January.
“I haven’t talked to him recently,” Graham said. “We were friends. I think the appeals process – he has a viable appeal, and we’ll just see what happens.”
Beginning the day of his sentencing, Menendez made it abundantly clear that he’d like a presidential pardon. Menendez had reportedly attempted to convince Joe Biden to issue a pardon during the former president’s time in office, but when that failed, he turned to Trump instead.
“President Trump is right,” Menendez said shortly after he was sentenced. “This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system.”
Just last week, after a judge declined to delay his wife Nadine Menendez’s trial any further due to her breast cancer diagnosis, the former senator once again tagged Trump in a social media post railing against the Southern District of New York.
Other than Menendez’s pleas, though, there’s been little news on whether a pardon could be in the works. Trump has issued a number of pardons or sentence commutations to those convicted for corruption-related crimes, including some Democrats like Rod Blagojevich and Kwame Kilpatrick.
Menendez, though, was not exactly a Trump ally during his time in the Senate. At various points during Trump’s first term, Menendez questioned whether the president was compromised by Russia, accused him of undermining the country’s Covid response, and said he had fueled a “resurgence of hate and anti-Semitism.”
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