The Republican senator Lindsey Graham said police officers defending the US Capitol on January 6 last year should have opened fire on the rioters and “shot them all in the head”, a former policeman who was nearly killed by the mob has alleged. Graham, a Donald Trump ally, condemned the insurrection in a speech hours after it unfolded and implied that he was severing his ties with the president, saying in a speech on the Senate floor: “Count me out, enough is enough.” In the months that followed, however, he visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, opposed the creation of a bipartisan panel to investigate the attack and sought to repair party rifts by arguing that it needed to act “with Trump, not without Trump”.
