Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) on Tuesday made a bizarre comparison between the judge whom Donald Trump has attacked for his “Mexican heritage” and members of supremacist groups.
In a radio interview first flagged by Buzzfeed News, host Sean Hannity cited an article from the conservative conspiracy site World Net Daily in pointing out to Hunter that a Latino bar association that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel belongs to linked to the National Council of La Raza, a civil rights group critical of Trump’s immigration policy, on its website. Hannity asked Hunter if he thought that connection to “La Raza” was “relevant.”
“Yeah, that is relevant,” he replied. “If you had a judge that was a member of a white supremacist group or a Native American supremacist group, or anything, that’s what La Raza is here in San Diego. They believe that California is theirs, that the United States took it wrongly and they’re gonna get it back one day. And they’re gonna take it by force if they have to.”
Hunter later went on to compare Curiel to a hypothetical Iraqi-American judge overseeing a case involving slain “American Sniper” Chris Kyle.
“So let’s say that Chris Kyle, the American sniper, is still alive and he was on trial for something, and his judge was a Muslim-American of Iraqi descent,” he said. “Here you have Chris Kyle, who’s killed a whole bunch of bad guys in Iraq. Would that be a fair trial for Chris Kyle? If you had that judge there? Probably not. And Chris Kyle could probably say, ‘this guy’s not gonna like me.’”
If that wasn’t enough to make his point, Hunter took the argument one step further: “You could look at the O.J. trial too, was that fair?”
But in the end, Hunter and Hannity both resolved that it was a “bigger deal” that the law firm in the class action case against Trump U paid the Clintons for speeches and had “ties to Obama and Moveon.org.”
Listen to the interview below via BuzzFeed:
