An op-ed posted June 11 by Huffington Post contributor Jason Fuller was pulled by the website after Wednesday’s attack on congressional Republicans.
“Impeachment Is No Longer Enough; Donald Trump Must Face Justice,” a call for the prosecution and execution of the president, was published just three days before 66-year-old gunman James Hodgkinson shot Rep. Steve Scalise and three others on an Alexandria, Virginia, baseball field. A reporter for The Daily Caller noticed the deletion late Wednesday and found a cached version still available.
“Trump’s impeachment and removal from office are no longer enough,” the HuffPo contributor wrote. “Draining the swamp means not only ejecting Trump from the presidency, but also bringing himself and everyone assisting in his agenda up on charges of treason. They must be convicted (there is little room to doubt their guilt). And then — upon receiving guilty verdicts — they must all be executed under the law. Anything less than capital punishment — or at least life imprisonment without parole in a maximum security detention facility — would send yet another message to the world that America has lost its moral compass.”
The writer then asserted that Republican leadership should face the same fate.
“Nothing would do more than to convict them of the highest offense defined by our Constitution, and then to deliver the ultimate punishment. Donald Trump deserves nothing less,” the author wrote. “Mitch McConnell, Steve Bannon, and Paul Ryan should also share Donald Trump’s fate, for they have done more than practically anyone to protect him and to throw our country under the proverbial bus. In order to survive, we as a nation must deliver the ultimate punishment under the law to all involved in its current destruction.”
Mr. Fuller responded to an avalanche of criticism on Thursday by posting a response on Medium.
“What appears to have garnered the most vitriol was my opinion that President Trump and his co-conspirators within the government should be executed for treason if found guilty in a court of law,” he said. “In other words: I want President Trump to be fully investigated, face the charges of treason, and then executed under the law should a guilty verdict be attained. […] I 100 percent stand behind every word that I wrote and make no attempts to apologize or to appease the Trump supporters who are unable to comprehend those words.”
The writer said it was disappointing that HuffPo pulled his work since the website framed Mr. Trump “as a racist, misogynist, et al.” during the election season.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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