CLEVELAND — It is not enough to simply beat Hillary Clinton, an adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign said. She must be killed.
The theme of the last two nights has been less “Make America Safe Again” or “Make America Work Again” and more “Lock Her Up.” But some of Trump’s most diehard supporters want to go further—they want her to be executed.
“Anyone that commits treason should be shot,” Al Baldasaro, an adviser to the Trump campaign for veterans issues, told The Daily Beast. “I believe Hillary Clinton committed treason. She put people in danger. When people take confidential material off a server, you’re sharing information with the enemy. That’s treason.”
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Baldasaro was expanding on a violent call he made Tuesday, when he called for Clinton to be “put in the firing line” over her mishandling of classified emails. He made these remarks on the Jeff Kuhner Show, Buzzfeed reported.
But Trump’s adviser, who is also a state representative in New Hampshire, is not the only one at the convention who believes that Clinton should be executed for treasonous acts.
West Virginia lawmaker Michael Folk said earlier this week that Hillary Clinton should be “hung on the mall in Washington, DC” for treason. And on the campaign trail, reports show that Trump supporters have repeatedly called for her death.
The mood at the Republican National Convention has turned decidedly ugly—on stage, primetime speaker Chris Christie conducted a mock trial of Clinton, playing to the crowd to convict her, and the crowd repeatedly called for her to be put in jail. Ben Carson tried to tie Clinton to Lucifer in his Tuesday night address.
Baldasaro called for Clinton to be sent directly to the afterlife. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, he argued, a conviction for treason could result in execution.
“I’m a military man. Any person who gives up information on an unclassified server, you’re putting Americans at risk,” he told The Daily Beast. “If you’re the commander in chief or you’re the secretary of state, you’re dealing with the military. What makes her any better than people in the military? What makes her above the law?”
Baldasaro has a history of controversial remarks. As an adviser to the campaign on veterans issues, he said earlier this year that accounting for $6 million in veterans charity money Trump promised was “not high on my priority list” and that he was “not concerned about it.”
