An ex-FBI counterterrorism expert compared President Donald Trump to Saddam Hussein just before his threat-filled speech at the Department of Justice on Friday.
Christopher O’Leary, a former senior executive at the FBI’s counterterrorism division, described the parallels between the Republican and the former Iraqi leader in an interview with MSNBC.
“If Donald Trump wants to prosecute a perceived enemy, does he have the people … who will do the hard work of investigating at the FBI?” MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked.
“I don’t think so. But, I like to point people back to Saddam Hussein in 1979,” O’Leary responded. “There’s a famous clip where he actually brings a bunch of people into a theater and talks about a conspiracy against him, and starts reading out 58 names of people who were conspiring against him, and secret police come and escort the people out one by one.”
When you “get to double digits, people start bowing and pledging fealty to him,” he continued. “When you start using intimidation and coercion to go after any group of people, sooner or later, you’re going to get down to a group that’s going to be compliant.”
Trump speaks to the Justice Department (Getty Images)
Moments after O’Leary’s remarks, Trump gave a speech on restoring “law and order” at the Justice Department to spout conspiracies and specify targets on his enemies list, including former special counsel Jack Smith, whom he called “deranged,” and named media organizations whose news reporting is “illegal,” he claimed.
He claimed that his 2024 election victory had “given us a mandate” for “a far-reaching investigation … into the corruption of our system” by Democrats, voting to “expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government” and “expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct.”
It’s unclear that’s what his voters were voting for. As for a “mandate,” Trump won the support of about 33 percent of eligible voters in America.
The president also argued the department had allowed a “corrupt group of hacks within the ranks of the American government [to] obliterate the trust and goodwill built up over generations.”
As Trump spoke about weaponizing the DOJ to go after his perceived enemies, he railed that the Justice Department “weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people” during criminal investigations against him.
Trump’s comments followed the agency’s firing of dozens of prosecutors who helped investigate the rioters involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attacks. Trump also shut down the January 6 probe on his first day in office, and pardoned some 1,500 people convicted for crimes related to the riots, including some seen on live TV by millions of Americans assaulting police officers. Trump called the rioters “hostages” in his speech.
The president called on prosecutors to investigate multiple media organizations he claims are biased against him, such as CNN and MSNBC.
“They’re not legitimate people. They’re horrible people, they’re scum. And you have to know that … And I believe that CNN and [MSNBC] who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” he said.
His remarks echo prior statements from FBI Director Kash Patel, who once vowed to prosecute journalists he believes have “lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Biden’s critics have yet to come up with any evidence that 2020 election Trump lost was rigged.
