A Republican senator came clean about who made the emergency call the night Lindsey Graham died from a heart attack.
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville told reporters on Monday evening that one of his former staffers made the 911 call on Saturday night when South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham suffered an aortic dissection at his Washington, D.C. home.
“My former scheduler was Lindsey’s scheduler, and one of my staff members was with that scheduler the night Lindsey called,” Tuberville, 71, told reporters in a video shared by CBS News. “He called, basically, he said, ‘Listen, I’m having chest pains, uh, you know, I need to do something. Could you call 911?’”
“And so she called 911; they were at a restaurant downtown watching the soccer game,” he continued. “By the time she got there, 911 had knocked the door down and they were working on him.”
“It’s just one of those things. Lindsey basically worked himself to death,” he added. “Most of us have families. He didn’t have any family.”
Tuberville highlighted how Graham, 71, traveled frequently around the globe “to try to work out something for our country.”
“We’d either talk golf, or we talked about him going overseas somewhere and talking to some ambassador or some president,” the former college football coach explained. “He was very well known, he was very smart, he knew foreign relations, and uh, no, there’s no conspiracy theory here.”
Graham’s office did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Graham died suddenly on Saturday night after returning from a trip to Ukraine. The Washington, D.C. Medical Examiner’s office found in a preliminary examination that the South Carolina senator died from “Aortic Dissection due to Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease,” according to his office.
An Axios report revealed that, after speaking on the phone with President Donald Trump, Graham told another person that he felt unwell. Though the person encouraged him to seek medical help, Graham reportedly shrugged off the advice, instead saying that he would seek medical advice after his planned appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning.
Trump, 80, revealed that he and Graham spoke about Russia sanctions and his war on Iran, and that the senator was “tired” following his trip to Ukraine.
“I can’t die now,” he joked, according to Axios. “I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.”
Trump recommended that Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, fulfill the remainder of the senator’s term—a decision that was upheld by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday. Nordone, who has no political experience, is the state’s first female senator.
