Top Trump aide: Fire Clinton staffers over ‘anti-Catholic’ remarks

Donald Trump’s campaign manager is calling on Hillary Clinton to apologize and fire staffers on her campaign for comments about Catholics in leaked emails.

{mosads}During a Wednesday conference call with reporters, Kellyanne Conway hammered the Democratic nominee’s campaign for what she called “vicious, anti-Catholic bigotry” and said the remarks threatened Americans’ religious liberty.

“Everyone involved should be ashamed,” Conway said on the call. “The hostility towards religious liberty and to the beliefs that we hold as Catholics should not go unnoticed or unpunished.

“We call on Hillary Clinton to apologize and to fire the staff who have engaged in this vicious, anti-Catholic bigotry,” she continued.

Wikileaks has been publishing leaked emails allegedly from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account. The dump included one 2011 email exchange in which Jennifer Palmieri, now Clinton’s communications director, made comments about conservatives who embraced Catholicism.

John Halpin, a senior fellow at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, criticized conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch for a “bastardization” of the Catholic faith.

Palmieri replied, “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

On Wednesday’s call, Conway likened the exchange to emails leaked in July showing top Democratic National Committee appearing to discuss Bernie Sanders’ religion. Sanders is Jewish, but a DNC official questioned whether he was an atheist.

Trump’s campaign manager also attacked Clinton on abortion, saying the Dem nominee supports partial-birth abortion.

“The American people need to know who they are and their very radical agenda that will be an assault on Catholics and all people of faith in good will,” she said.

Conway was joined by other top Trump surrogates and high-profile Catholic Republicans.

Newt Gingrich, a former House Speaker and top Trump surrogate, warned that Clinton’s staffers would be the ones to help the Democratic nominee decide who should fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court bench.

While addressing a Christian university earlier on Wednesday, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, also called on Clinton’s campaign to apologize for the “anti-Catholic, anti-evangelical” remarks made by the former secretary of State’s staff in the leaked email exchange.

“If only on behalf of her Catholic running mate, Hillary Clinton should renounce those bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-evangelical remarks and her campaign staff should apologize to people of faith and do it now,” Pence said at Liberty University.

This story was updated at 3:03 p.m.