Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, blasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday for saying she wants to see the president in prison, and likened her to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
“Pelosi said @realDonaldTrump should go to prison. But she said nothing about a trial or a jury or a presumption of innocence,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter.
“Is this worse than Joe McCarthy?” he continued. “They are destroying any adherence to our constitution. And the Fake News failure to hold them accountable is corrupt.”
Giuliani’s remarks follow Pelosi’s comments in a closed meeting Tuesday with several top Democrats about whether to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump because of his actions during the Russia investigation.
Multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting told POLITICO that Pelosi said, “I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison.” Sources also said that instead of impeachment, Pelosi preferred to see Trump defeated at the ballot box and then prosecuted for his alleged crimes.
Giuliani also wrote on Sunday that Pelosi “doesn’t have a particular crime in mind just prison. If you can’t see she’s over the top, if not over the Hill, you are blinded by partisanship or hatred.”
Last week, Trump lashed out at Pelosi for her comment, calling her a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person.”
Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who was not at the meeting, defended Pelosi’s comments Sunday morning in a conversation with Brett Baier, host of “Fox News Sunday.”
“It’s kind of rich to have the president complain about this when he began a campaign with ‘lock her up’ as his bumper sticker and led an effort to delegitimize the first African-American president by claiming he wasn’t born in this country,” Cicilline said, referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
“Look, I don’t have any difficulty with those words,” added Cicilline, a member of the House Judiciary Committee. “I think what is really at stake here is the responsibility of the Judiciary Committee to conduct oversight to demonstrate to the American people that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine