GOP Candidate Backed by Party Leadership Said Merrick Garland Should ‘Probably Be Executed’
Republican congressional candidate Carl Paladino told Breitbart listeners last week that Attorney General Merrick Garland “probably should be executed” following the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last Monday..
In an interview with Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle, Paladino said that “people like Garland, who should not only be impeached, he probably should be executed.”
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“He’s a lost soul. He’s trying to get an image, and his methodology is just terrible,” Paladino elaborated. “To raid the home of a former president is just … people are scratching their heads and they’re saying, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’”
“What’s wrong with this guy?” is a question that’s loomed over Paladino’s entire campaign. In Feb. 2021, he praised Adolf Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today.” On social media, Paladino boosted posts claiming that the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings were false-flag attacks. In July, he hired a man convicted on child pornography-related charges as his new assistant treasurer.
When Boyle later questioned Paladino about his comment that Garland should be “executed,” Paladino claimed he was “just being facetious.”
The New York Republican primary is less than three weeks away, Nick Langworthy and Paladino’s polling is effectively in a “statistical tie” to win the nomination to represent the state’s 23rd District, according to the Buffalo News, with nearly 24 percent of voters still undecided. Paladino has been endorsed by major GOP figures, including third-ranking house Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who has a adversarial relationship with Langworthy, the New York Republican Party chairman.
Stefanik’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment about Paladino saying Garland should be executed.
Since the Mar-A-Lago raid, federal law enforcement officials have faced a torrent of violent threats against themselves and their families. Days after the search, a man was killed by police after attempting to break into the FBI’s Cincinnati office armed with an AR-15-style rifle. He had previously posted on Truth Social about the need to “Kill the F.B.I. onsight.” Federal prosecutors have also charged a man in Pennsylvania who made threats on the far right website Gab to “slaughter” the FBI agents who executed the Mar-A-Lago search and planned to “kill more of them before I drop.”
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