Three prominent ethics experts have called for the Senate Ethics Committee, the only non-partisan committee in the Senate, to investigate the actions of South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham to determine if he violated Senate rules of conduct by attempting to interfere in Georgia’s vote count, CNN reports.
Walter Shaub, a former top ethics watchdog for the federal government; Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush’s administration; and Claire Finkelstein, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, wrote a letter requesting the Committee to look into Graham’s calls to the Georgia Secretary of State to influence the way he counted votes in the presidential election.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has said that Graham contacted him with the desire that Raffensperger discard hundreds of thousands of absentee votes in an effort to give the state to outgoing incumbent Republican president Donald Trump.
Trump lost the state of Georgia to President-elect Joe Biden by 14,000 votes. Graham allegedly called Raffensperger–and, Graham claims, election officials in other states–to bolster Trump’s efforts to disenfranchise enough voters to win key swing states.
It’s highly unusual for Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to contact state elections officials about vote tallies, particularly a state official from a state the Senator does not represent. Neither the Senate or the Judiciary Committee have any Constitutional authority to oversee state election management.
The letter asks the Ethics Committee to investigate if Graham may have used his position with the Judiciary Committee to threaten a committee or Senate investigation into the state.