Sen. Lindsey Graham has blocked a Senate resolution that would have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide following a request from White House officials, he told Axios in a phone interview on Saturday.
Graham said he blocked the resolution because Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was in town to meet with President Trump at the time.
"After the meeting, we kind of huddled up and talked about what happened," he said. A White House legislative affairs official told Graham that Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was going to bring up his Armenian Genocide resolution and asked if Graham could "please object.”
"I said sure," Graham said. "The only reason I did it is because he [Erdoğan] was still in town. ... That would've been poor timing. I'm trying to salvage the relationship if possible.”
Asked whether he felt uncomfortable blocking the Armenian Genocide resolution, Graham replied: "Yeah. Because I like Bob [Menendez]. He's been working on this for years, but I did think with the president of Turkey in town that was probably more than the market would bear.”
Last week Menendez and his Republican Senate colleague Ted Cruz introduced the Armenian Genocide resolution again. This time it was blocked by another Republican Senate ally, David Perdue.
