Weekday morning CNN Newsroom co-host, chief national security correspondent, and former Obama administration official Jim Sciutto offered a repulsive piece of analysis Friday night on the suspect arrested in this week’s mail bombs, comparing the President to Islamic terrorists like ISIS peddling online propaganda to help lone wolves become “self-radicalized” and carry out attacks.
Of course, Sciutto received zero pushback on his asinine and ugly comparison.
Instead, he was teed up by Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer, who remarked how the suspect “advertis[ed] on that van” with “all those stickers....where he stands politically” in addition to holding a “CNN sucks” sign at a Trump rally, so it was no surprise he decided to target them.
Sciutto began unwinding his ugly analogy by arguing that “[y]ou could debate and investigate the influence that this kind of material and rhetoric had on him” and while we “don’t know” for sure, “there’s a clear match here” between the supect and the targets.
He noted how there were “a lot of the faces on that truck” that the bomber targeted, so there’s “an overlap between the kind of stuff he was sharing, the kind of stuff he was driving around in the truck and the targets he chose to target with these real IEDs.”
It was here that Sciutto showed his contempt for the President and those even mildly associated with him by comparing them to members of ISIS:
[A]nd it struck me the similarity, in some ways, or at least the parallels to lone wolf terrorist actors. ISIS folks, et cetera. You know, self-radicalized. They radicalized by things on the internet, violent, Islamic terrorism. This guy radicalized by violent intentions, you know, with domestic political targets, acting on his own, at least that's what's assumed at this point, but parallels to the way lone wolves who do international terrorism hear a domestic terrorist, in effect, who had a similar path.
And again, that received zero pushback from Blitzer, senior White House correspondent Pamela Brown, former Comey FBI aide Josh Campbell, or crime and justice reporters Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz.
Commercial advertisers in the break following Sciutto’s Trump/ISIS comparison included fuboTV, Humira, McDonald’s, and Priceline.
To see the relevant transcript from CNN’s The Situation Room on October 26, click “expand.”
CNN’s The Situation Room
October 26, 2018
5:10 p.m. EasternWOLF BLITZER: He was advertising on that van with all those — all those stickers exactly where he stands politically and we also showed, Jim, some video at a Trump rally where he was up there with a big poster, saying “CNN sucks.” Clearly, that would explain why there were two of these bombs sent to CNN headquarters — CNN offices in New York.
JIM SCIUTTO: You could debate and investigate the influence that this kind of material and rhetoric had on him. You don't know. That said, there's a clear match here, right? A lot of the faces on that truck, as Pamela was saying, were faces that he targeted. You know, he had crosshairs on our colleagues, Van Jones, Michael Moore, etc. He faces of some of the Senators, Eric Holder, others who were targeted here. So, at least there is a — an overlap between the kind of stuff he was sharing, the kind of stuff he was driving around in the truck and the targets he chose to target with these real IEDs and it struck me the similarity, in some ways, or at least the parallels to lone wolf terrorist actors. ISIS folks, et cetera. You know, self-radicalized. They radicalized by things on the internet, violent, Islamic terrorism. This guy radicalized by violent intentions, you know, with domestic political targets, acting on his own, at least that's what's assumed at this point, but parallels to the way lone wolves who do international terrorism hear a domestic terrorist, in effect, who had a similar path.
Editor's Note, 6:54 p.m. Eastern: This post has been updated to correctly reflect the comparison made in the fourth paragraph.
