Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen U.S. soldier with whom Donald Trump got into a war of words over the summer, said Tuesday he was shocked and saddened to hear the GOP nominee talking about his son, Capt. Humayun Khan, again at the presidential debate on Sunday.
“We were not only shocked — we were saddened … for such disingenuous expression of his thinking and of his feeling, and … it was so blatant political expediency,” Mr. Khan said on CNN’s “New Day.”
Hillary Clinton had invoked Capt. Khan’s name at Sunday’s debate, saying Mr. Trump never apologized to the Khan family after attacking them in the wake of their appearance at the Democratic National Convention in July.
Mr. Trump said at the debate that Capt. Khan would still be alive today if he had been president, saying he would not have gone into Iraq.
Mr. Khan also slammed Mr. Trump for vowing to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s private email set-up, pointing to former President Nixon’s ordering the firing of a special investigator tasked with looking into the Watergate scandal. That move prompted Nixon’s attorney general and deputy attorney general to resign in protest.
“This is not a Third World country. This is the democracy of [the] United States,” Mr. Khan said. “What example are we setting?”
“That event of ’Saturday Night Massacre’ is in our history, and we are so far away from that,” Mr. Khan said, using a nickname given to the events of 1973. “This candidate thinks and makes us fear that this candidate is able to do that sort of thing all over again.”
Mrs. Clinton had said at the debate that it’s “awfully good” that someone with Mr. Trump’s temperament is not in charge of the law in the United States.
“Because you’d be in jail,” Mr. Trump replied.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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