New Hampshire State Representative Al Baldasaro is a man of few ideas, a minor deficiency he makes up for by repeating the ones he has over and over. His pet cause: arguing loudly and publicly that Hillary Clinton should be killed. Baldasaro has justified his comments by saying he wants Clinton executed by a firing squad, “for treason.”
Baldasaro is currently serving his fifth term in the New Hampshire House. He’s also co-chairing Trump’s veteran’s coalition, having retired from the Marine Corps some 22 years ago. In July, he was investigated by the Secret Service after saying on the radio that Clinton should die because of Benghazi.
From ABC News:
“She is a disgrace for any, the lies she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi,” he said on the Jeff Kuhner Show Tuesday. “She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting back up security. Something’s wrong there.”
“Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason,” he continued.
Baldasaro doubled down to the Boston Globe, saying he “without a doubt” stood by his comments. This time it was about her emails:
“When you take classified information on a server that deals with where our State Department, Special Forces, CIA, whatever in other countries, that’s a death sentence for those people if that information gets in the hands of other countries or the terrorists,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s information for the enemy. In the military, shot, firing squad. So I stand by what I said.”
These remarks are worth quoting in full because they’re so flabbergasting; if you delivered them on Facebook or standing on a street corner, the cops would be arriving to chat with you in probably a matter of hours.
At the time, the Trump campaign even had to make the rare step (for them) of disavowing something:
But in case you didn’t think he meant it, Baldasaro assured MassLive.com this week that he really, really meant it. He wasn’t talked about assassination, he clarified, just governmentally-sanction killing:
But New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, a Republican who co-chairs Trump’s national veterans’ coalition, stressed that he was not saying someone should assassinate Clinton.
“The liberal media took what I said and went against the law and the Constitution and ran with it, and they said that I wanted her assassinated, which I never did,” Baldasaro told The Republican/MassLive.com. “I said I spoke as a veteran, and she should be shot in a firing squad for treason.”
This is, of course, a little more than a week after Donald Trump suggested “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton.
I mean: are these batshit motherfuckers trying to get her killed? It’s hard not to liken this to the route favored by certain sectors of the anti-abortion movement, where they demonize and dehumanize an opponent until some angry, disaffected person with a loose grasp on reality decides to take them at their word.