Cory Booker: ‘This is a Paul Revere moment. The Russians are coming.’
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., compared the Russian government’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election to the arrival of British forces that kicked off the American Revolutionary War.
“This is a Paul Revere moment,” Booker told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday night. “The Russians are coming.”
The interview followed President Trump’s sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday evening. But Booker insisted that he didn’t want to let the Comey drama distract from “the crisis of this moment, where we have Russia who has attacked our country in a cyber way — trying to undermine our elections.”
The FBI is probing Russian interference in the election and possible collusion by associates of the Trump campaign. In the immediate aftermath, several Democrats in Congress suggested that Comey’s firing was an attempt by the president to interfere with the ongoing investigation. Over the course of the next day, several reports emerged detailing Trump’s growing frustration with Comey’s refusal to abandon the Russia probe, as well as other issues.
In his interview with Burnett, Booker declined to weigh in on the theories surrounding Comey’s ouster but said of the Russia investigation, “Donald Trump clearly has not taken this seriously, in what should be a Paul Revere moment for our country, where people are talking about the Russians are coming.”
This historical analogy seems to be a favorite of Booker’s, who previously declared the heated 2016 presidential campaign to be a “Paul Revere moment.”
“I’m calling this a Paul Revere moment,” he said in an interview with Mic last year, calling on “other voices” to speak out against the divisive rhetoric that had come to dominate the campaign trail at that time.
“We need other people out there, people saying the enemy is not without, it’s within — people recognizing that the danger is when anger becomes so toxic, it starts to turn toward demagoguery.”
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