Yahoo Finance Meghan McCain Pushes Back on Dad's Close Friend Lindsey Graham: 'Certainly Doesn't Speak for Me'
Jason Kempin/Getty; ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Meghan McCain (left), Lindsey Graham
Meghan McCain offered a characteristically sharp-tongued statement this week after Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham commented on her reaction to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner being at Sen. John McCain's 2018 Washington, D.C., funeral.
"Lindsey Graham may consider himself a member of my family, but he is not and hasn't been for a very long time," the 36-year-old former View host, who had previously spoken warmly of Graham, tweeted on Wednesday.
"He certainly doesn't speak for me or my life experiences. Full stop," she wrote. "The media should stop treating him like he is an expert on anything McCain related."
Meghan's tweet comes after Graham, a longtime family friend, disputed an account in her audio memoir, Bad Republican.
In the audiobook, Meghan describes Kushner and Trump as "funeral crashers" at her dad's D.C. memorial, adding that she was unaware they had been invited to the event given that former President Donald Trump was explicitly not allowed.
"I saw Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner sitting toward the back. As far as I knew, they had not been invited by the family, but they showed up anyway ... It never even crossed my mind that they would come. Why would you go to something like that? It seemed audacious even for them," Meghan says in her memoir. "When I saw them, I thought, I hope that this is the most uncomfortable moment of your entire life."
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Lindsey Graham may consider himself a member of my family, but he is not and hasn’t been for a very long time. He certainly doesn’t speak for me or my life experiences. Full stop. The media should stop treating him like he is an expert on anything McCain related.
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) October 27, 2021
Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pushed back on the story this week, telling The Washington Post: "[Meghan] was upset they were there — I understand that, and she has hard feelings but I know what happened and nobody showed up uninvited."
Graham echoed what a McCain family friend told PEOPLE in 2019, though it didn't seem to sit well with Meghan.
Later on Wednesday, she offered another tweet, writing: "In life and in death I have pure, unadulterated loyalty to my father and my family. That's it. That's all you need to know. It is sad and unfortunate when private things are dragged out in public."
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A spokesperson for Graham declined to comment on the back-and-forth.
Making the media rounds for her new audiobook, Meghan has continued to speak out about Jared and Ivanka's attendance at her father's funeral, telling Andy Cohen on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live last week: "They should never have come, they had no business being there, I remember seeing them and seeing her specifically. They had no g------ business being there and it's something that still angers me, clearly."
GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Sen. Lindsey Graham
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The years of bad blood between the McCains and Trumps have continued with former President Trump — who has repeatedly assailed Sen. McCain — issuing a lengthy, 200-plus word statement last week, again criticizing both Meghan and her late father for a number of purported slights.
Graham, a longtime close friend of the late lawmaker, has more recently found himself at odds with Meghan given his support of Trump.
Meghan's public opinion on Graham has changed: She previously said she tried to separate the personal and the political when it came to their relationship.
"Lindsey is really hard for me to talk about in public because I have had to reconcile his politics right now are very different than mine, but I have known the man since I was 10 and I love him very much," she said on The View in 2019, adding then: "I think Trump appears to do weird things to people and I don't condone what he did, but I get it. I don't love it, but I can't talk crap about him."
