07/28/2026
Sen. Lindsey Graham planned to travel to Florida in early March to persuade President Trump to join Israel in the bombing of Hezbollah in Lebanon—until a friend talked him out of it.
The friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told him on a call before the trip that bringing the U.S. into the operation, in the midst of the Iran war, was going too far, too fast, according to unreleased footage from a documentary about the South Carolina Republican lawmaker that was being filmed before he died earlier this month.
“We’re concentrating right now on Iran,” Netanyahu said on the March 4 call, according to the footage, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. “If we tell Hezbollah that we’re going all the way, we threaten them, but if we actually do it, then they have no reason not to go all the way against us. And right now that’s not our interest,” he said on speakerphone.
“That’s actually good counsel,” Graham replied from his Senate office, which was covered with Trump hats, scattered papers and Planters Peanuts, with a bottle of bourbon on the shelf.
The extraordinary exchange was captured by the documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who had been granted extensive access to Graham since 2023. It provides an unvarnished look at Graham’s yearslong quest to topple the Iranian regime and the ways in which he persuaded Trump to strike, at times pushing for even more aggressive action than Netanyahu was prepared to take.
“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” he tells the crew, laughing loudly just after U.S. strikes on Iran began in February. “How long have we been pushing this?”
Read more and see a clip from the footage: 🔗 https://wsj.visitlink.me/X3pRCH
