00:00South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster announced Lindsey Graham's temporary replacement on Monday.
00:06His sister, Darlene Graham Nordone.
00:08Lindsey has always been there for me, and now I will be there for him.
00:14It is such a privilege to get to finish some of his important work,
00:18and I promise to work hard over the next several months to support the president
00:23and carry forward the efforts of my brother on behalf of the citizens of South Carolina and the United States.
00:31Now to Lindsey, I miss you more than I can even put into words, but I'm going to do this.
00:40I got it.
00:41Just hours before his sudden death, Senator Graham was cracking jokes about all the legislative work he had left to
00:47do.
00:47According to people close to the South Carolina Republican, Graham wasn't feeling well on Saturday,
00:52but rebuffing suggestions he seek medical care, he joked,
00:56I can't die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israeli-Saudi
01:01normalization.
01:02The late senator even wanted to wait to see a doctor until after his scheduled appearance on NBC's Meet the
01:07Press.
01:08Graham also spoke with President Trump not long before his heart gave out.
01:11The two spoke about his recent trip to Ukraine and the bipartisan Russia sanctions bill
01:16he had been pushing alongside Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.
01:19Now, with Graham gone, many of the issues that he was personally championing are suddenly without their most passionate advocate.
01:27So what happens to those priorities now?
01:29The Post's political reporter, Ryan King, has been digging into it.
01:32Yeah, well, there's a big interest on Capitol Hill in getting the sanctions bill through.
01:37That had been a bipartisan piece of legislation.
01:40At one point it had almost 85 senators backing it, and ultimately it didn't get passed because of President Trump's
01:50reluctance.
01:51He wanted to keep his options on the table and not be forced to apply financial penalties against Russia.
02:00That was as severe as what was in that piece of legislation.
02:03But before Lindsey Graham died, he had been pretty optimistic that President Trump had come around, and that was really
02:11the big barrier.
02:12So now there's a big bipartisan push to get that sanctions bill across the finish line.
02:19And then as for some of Senator Graham's other priorities, there are things that the Trump administration is looking into.
02:28One of the things before he died was he believed that the Trump administration needed to take a more forceful
02:35approach against Iran over the Strait of Hormuz.
02:39And we've seen over recent days the president do just that.
02:44There have been a lot of strikes against Iran, and fighting has resumed essentially between the U.S. and Iran.
02:52The Trump administration had sent a notice to Congress to notify them about this.
02:59And then one of Graham's really big, ambitious items that he was going after was trying to get normalization of
03:07relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
03:11That's extremely ambitious.
03:13A lot of leaders have wanted to get that done.
03:16And it's something that President Trump himself is really interested in.
03:20So I think it's fair to say that there's going to be an effort to pursue that as well.
03:26There's just a lot of barriers at play with that one.
03:30I think the Saudi leadership is not really too interested in normalizing relations with Israel until there's more of a
03:39resolution to the situation with the Palestinians.
03:44But that was something that Graham was working really hard on, and he was growing optimistic that a path was
03:50forming for that before he died.
03:52So there's certainly a lot of interest in carrying on some of the late senators' top priorities, particularly pertaining to
04:02foreign policy.
04:03Okay.
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