A high-profile doctor says Lindsey Graham’s final trip to Ukraine may have contributed to his sudden death.
As America woke up to the shocking news that the 71-year-old Trump ally had died overnight, fueling MAGA conspiracy theories about foul play, Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel had a less incendiary theory.
Speaking on Fox & Friends, Siegel said that Graham’s father had died from a heart attack when the senator was young, giving him a family history of cardiovascular disease.
This, coupled with Graham’s lengthy journey to Ukraine this week, may have increased the risk factors associated with a fatal cardiac event.
Flights from Washington, D.C. to Kyiv generally take between 10 to 14 hours depending on the layover.
“A long plane flight from Ukraine increases his risk of blood clotting,” Siegel said.
“There’s 350,000 per year out-of-the hospital cardiac arrests. Only 10 percent of them make it because, as you can imagine, you can’t get there fast enough to restart the heart right away,” he added.
“The vast majority don’t make it, and most of the time it’s heart disease that causes this.”
Graham died on Saturday night after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.”
The South Carolina senator celebrated his 71st birthday on Thursday, and on Friday he was halfway around the world, smiling alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, touring drone facilities in Kyiv and pushing for tougher sanctions against Russia.
Emergency services responded to a call around 8:30 p.m. Saturday for a person suffering chest pains at a Capitol Hill home owned by Graham, according to police scanner audio obtained by The Washington Post.
About 25 minutes later, emergency personnel said that CPR was in progress and that a man at the house was suffering from cardiac arrest.
CNN aired 911 dispatch audio related to the call from Graham’s house, where the words “cardiac arrest” can be heard, but the call contains no confirmation of the cause of the senator’s death.
The news sent shockwaves across MAGA world, triggering a mix of grief, praise and conspiracy theories.
Graham had spent years cultivating a reputation as one of Ukraine’s fiercest champions in the U.S. Senate.
Many were quick to question the timing of his death, so soon after he had returned from meeting Vladimir Putin’s greatest enemy.
“Did Russia just poison Lindsey Graham?” Laura Loomer wrote on X, reposting a clip of a press conference Graham held during his trip in which he talked up his push to impose harsher sanctions on Moscow.
But Siegel took a different view, noting the Senator’s family history. Graham was a young man when both his parents died.
His mother, Millie Graham, died at age 52 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was soon followed by his father, F.J. Graham, who died of a heart attack at age 69. He was 22.
Graham’s only sister, Darline, was just 13 years old at the time, and Graham took on the role of caring for her. He ultimately adopted her after enlisting in the Air Force so that she could receive his military benefits.
“He played an extraordinary role in bringing up his sister, Darline, when both his parents died suddenly, close together,” the doctor said.
“As someone looking at the medical details, when his father dies of heart disease - a sudden cardiac arrest - when he’s so young, you wonder whether there could be that risk for him in terms of heart disease.”
