California Governor Jerry Brown stepped up his attack on U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday evening during an interview with PBS Newshour, accusing him of using “Gestapo” tactics.
The Gestapo were the secret police of Nazi Germany, notorious for rounding up Jews and sending them to their deaths.
Earlier in the day, Brown accused the Trump administration of “basically going to war against the state of California” after Sessions filed a lawsuit in Sacramento Tuesday evening challenging three of California’s “sanctuary state” laws under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
He appeared on Newshour, along with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, to be interviewed by Judy Woodruff. The following exchange opened the interview:
Woodruff: The Trump administration is saying basically that the State of California is protecting lawbreakers. Is that what you’re doing?
Brown: No. That’s absolutely untrue. And as you’ve seen from the various indictments and the guilty pleas, the White House is full of liars, and, unfortunately, our Attorney General, with his political stunt, adds to the lies of the White House. We’re not protecting criminals. We have a law that says exactly the opposite. And any time Jeff Sessions or Immigration [and Customs Enforcement] wants to work to help deport criminals in this state, we’ll be glad to help him. But that’s not what he’s doing. He’s going after men, women, and children — some who have worked 10 or 20 years picking our food, washing our dishes, building houses. And, yeah, we need immigration reform for the whole nation. We don’t need a Gestapo kind of tactic with vitriol spewing out of Jeff Sessions’s mouth. It’s unbecoming, it’s a political stunt, and it’s not what our highest law enforcement officer should be doing.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf — a former Brown aide — called Sessions a “racist” on Wednesday as well.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.