In my inbox: a letter Sen. Graham wrote to Attorney General Holder asking him to stop being cute about the ultimate venue for the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators. “In your testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 14, 2010, you stated that ‘New York is not off the table’ as [...]

Pivoting off Lindsey Graham’s abandonment of his own climate bill, Ezra Klein makes a broader observation: It’s further evidence that the “lone Republican” strategy doesn’t work. Time and again, Democrats have ended up in a room with a single Republican who seemed willing to cut a deal. It was Olympia Snowe on health care, Bob [...]

Marc Ambinder wrote a good update on Guantanamo detentions on Friday that I somehow missed. It’s a timely scorecard of who’s still at GTMO and what the administration’s plans for them are. Hanging over the head of all of them is a prospective deal between the White House and Lindsey Graham to trade the closure [...]

Several weeks ago, I interviewed Lindsey Graham’s staff to find out what specifically Graham’s objection was to trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court. The answer: the inadvertent release of classified information. So I wrote a piece on that after I noticed that the rules for handling classified information in military commissions are substantively [...]

Hustler’s gambit: when the mark starts paying, raise his interest rate. And Lindsey Graham is hustling. According to the Post, now he wants a “grand bargain” over terrorism detentions — which is to say, allowing them fewer procedural and substantive rights to contest their detentions and plead their cases — with the White House in [...]

If the Wall Street Journal has it right, the Grahamanuel deal to swap a Khalid Shaikh Mohammed military commission for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is inching forward in the Senate. Well, sort of. The paper claims that anonymous Democratic Senate aides “say Mr. Graham believes two other Republicans are willing to [...]

Ezra Klein has some fun with Lindsey Graham’s health-care-dare. (“‘If they jam through health care,’ said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then Democrats will have ‘poisoned the well’ on other issues…’”) The thing about Graham is this: other GOPers can pull the trigger on Permanent Obstructionism, but he can’t. He’s the guy who wants [...]

It took me a while, but Sen. Lindsey Graham’s staff — and, really, credit to them for dealing with a reporter who obviously disagrees with the senator’s position — pointed me to the heart of Graham’s objections to a civilian trial for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators. Graham favors a military commission for KSM [...]

A sure sign that Keep America Safe is hemorrhaging credibility over its ”al-Qaeda Seven” ad is Bill Kristol’s fusillade of desperate spinning over the last couple days. In his post today, he goes after the Bush/Reagan-era GOP lawyers who denounce the ad, pitying himself in the process  –”Nameless straw men (including me) and women (Liz Cheney) are [...]

Much remains unclear, but I spoke with Graham’s chief spokesman, Kevin Bishop, and here’s what I got for you so far: Primarily, the system Graham is designing is set up for handling the Obama administration’s so-called “Fifth Category” of detainees that a Justice Department task force recommended against charging and releasing. “What do you do [...]