A former Justice Department official and law professor is calling for Republicans under former President Donald Trump to resort to "banana republic means" to exact revenge on everyone who investigated them.
John Yoo, who served in the George W. Bush administration where he became infamous for authoring a memo that greenlit the use of torture for prisoners of war, has been an impassioned defender of Trump, proclaiming at one point that the Founding Fathers would have opposed impeaching Trump because it was an election year at the time.
“You have to retaliate against them in exactly the same way until you get some deterrence," Yoo stated at NatCon 4, in remarks flagged by Reason Magazine editor Stephanie Slade. "If we’re not going to become a banana republic, unfortunately we’re going to have to use banana republic means.”
He then went on to praise John Eastman — a far-right attorney being prosecuted in Georgia for helping Trump craft a scheme to block electors from battleground states won by President Joe Biden from being counted — as "courageous."
Trump and his allies have long claimed that the independent special counsel and state-level investigations, which have led to four separate criminal indictments against the former president for election offenses, retention of classified information, and falsifying business records, were orchestrated behind the scenes by Biden as a plot to hamstring his political opposition. They have not provided any evidence this is the case.
Most of these cases appear to be on hold until after the election for various procedural reasons. The exception is the Manhattan business records falsification case, which went to trial earlier this year and ended with a 34-count felony conviction. Sentencing was originally set to take place later this week, but was delayed to September while Judge Juan Merchan reviews Trump's claims to be immune from prosecution.
Read also: Trump's 'lust for revenge' makes him even more dangerous after conviction: D.C. insider
Concerned social media users uttered a collective, "yikes" to Yoo's comments.
@0xPBIT wrote: "race to the bottom takes you to the bedrock of hell."
"John Yoo wrote the opinion authorizing the use of torture. We convicted German lawyers at Nuremberg for this," wrote @KyleMcC36631324. "He is not in prison only because of the enormous deference we give prior administrations. And his opinion should count for less than nothing."
"'He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,'" wrote @LennyGoodnight. "'And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.'”
"End stage unitary executive theory," wrote @OrrellAEI.
