US President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donlad Jr., has accused Democrats of employing the same tactics as the Nazi Germany’s secret police Gestapo, as they force ahead with plans to impeach his father.
Speaking on Monday, Trump’s son called the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry "kangaroo court stuff" and "Soviet-era tactics," repeating a familiar Republican attacking line in response to the weeks-long probe.
Democratic lawmakers in the US House of Representatives have been investigating revelations by a whistle-blower that Trump attempted to force Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in a July phone call to dig up dirt on his possible 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
"It's being pushed out there by the quote unquote 'party of tolerance,' they're not so tolerant when you don't agree with them, they're far from it, frankly, there's nothing less tolerant than a leftist who's preaching tolerance," Trump Jr. said. "And we've seen all of that, so the whole thing is crazy and the fact that the media is totally complicit in it."
"They won't question the process or say 'is this even remotely fair that the President can't ask questions, can't have his counsel present?'" he added. "This is Gestapo tactics used against the duly elected President of the United States of America to try and overturn an election because they didn't like the results."
Last Thursday, six weeks after launching a secretive probe that included holding private hearings and summoning witnesses to Congress, the Democrats accepted Republican calls for a more open investigation and introduced a formal impeachment resolution that was passed with a majority vote along party lines.
The Republicans were so fed up with the process that on one occasion a group of lawmakers stormed a hearing room in breach of security laws governing such sessions.
Trump himself also railed against the Democrats on Monday, saying at a rally in Lexington, Kentucky that his opponents were creating a "deranged hyper partisan impeachment witch hunt.”
“Radical Democrats are going totally insane," Trump said.
He also went after the whistle-blower at the heart of the investigation, saying the unknown intelligence official has gone silent after he released a rough transcript of his phone conversation with Zelensky.
“You haven’t heard about the whistleblower after that, have you? Cause the whistleblower said lots of things that weren’t so good folks. You’re gonna find out,” Trump told his supporters.