Paxton likens FBI to ‘Gestapo’ in Bannon interview

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) likened the FBI to the Nazi “Gestapo” during an interview with Steve Bannon, a former President Trump adviser.   

Bannon, who hosts the right-wing podcast “War Room,” compared the FBI to the Nazi Gestapo, a sentiment Paxton agreed with during his interview with the former White House chief strategist. 

“They’ve turned into a Gestapo, an American Gestapo, and the DOJ is just as corrupt with Lisa Monaco, Matthew Colangelo, Merrick Garland, all of them,” Bannon said, referring to the Department of Justice and officials from the department. 

Paxton, who was previously impeached by the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives and eventually acquitted, agreed with Bannon and offered a similar assessment of the law enforcement agency. 

“Steve, I’m telling you, they are the Gestapo,” Paxton said Wednesday. “We’re in Venezuela. We might as well be in China. We might as well be in Germany during the ’30s and ’40s. It is corrupt. It is the Gestapo.”

“We’ve got to have more exposure, and then, second, we’ve got to have a president who will come in, bring in an attorney general that will take these guys out and make sure that the corruption is eliminated and that we start over,” Paxton, who is reportedly under FBI investigation, continued. “The FBI was formed to go after organized crime, and the problem with that now is they are organized crime.”

Bannon then called for dissolving the FBI and asked Paxton if he agreed. The Texas attorney general agreed, alleging the FBI is a “political organization” that is riddled with “corruption.” 

“It would be better to have nothing right now,” he said. “They’re not there to stop crime anymore. They are political organizations designed to persecute people like you and me. And so it would be better not to have anything then to have that. So yes, you have to you have to take into the ground and start over. There’s so much corruption.”