Lawrence O’Donnell Says Lindsey Graham’s Riot Comments Reach Senate ‘Indecency’ Level That Surpasses Strom Thurmond

Lawrence O’Donnell said that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) predicting riots if former President Donald Trump is indicted is a historic new low for a U.S. senator.

O’Donnell believes the comments are so unbecoming of a member of the upper chamber that they are worse than anything deceased former Sen. Strom Thurmond ever said.

Graham told Fox News on Sunday, “If they tried to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there literally will be riots in the street.”

The comments, according to the MSNBC host, lower the bar beyond anything one of America’s most infamous segregationists ever said.

In spite of Thurmond’s 48 years in the Senate, and an unsuccessful 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, he’s been dethroned by Graham as the biggest Senate dirtbag, O’Donnell said on Tuesday’s The Last Word.

The host reminded his audience President Joe Biden invoked Graham earlier in the day during a speech in Pennsylvania.

“Biden, of all people, attacking Lindsey Graham for saying that if Donald Trump is indicted, there will be rioting in the streets,” O’Donnell said. “And I say Joe Biden of all people because the very last thing Joe Biden wants to do is attack a United States senator.”

He added:

In Joe Biden’s Senate, and the Senate where I worked in the 1990s, that just was not done. But no one in the United States Senate in those days reached the peak of indecency that Lindsey Graham reached Sunday night when he said there will be rioting in the streets. Not even Strom Thurmond.

Lindsey Graham is a United States senator because Strom Thurmond could not live forever, even though he tried. South Carolina’s very senior Sen. Strom Thurmond chose not to run for reelection for the Senate when he was 100-years-old, therefore creating the opening for congressman Lindsey Graham to move up in 2002.

O’Donnell noted Thurmond was divulged to have had a Black daughter, whom he never acknowledged.

“Like Lindsey Graham, Strom Thurman never apologized,” O’Donnell concluded. “But even Strom Thurman never said if the leader of my party is indicted, there will be rioting in the streets. No senator has ever said that.”

Thurmond clung to life for 101 years, and spent most them opposing basic civil liberties for Black Americans.

He died in 2003, and some claimed the segregationist regretted his racist past.

Watch above, via MSNBC.