Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes as a New York jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts. Seth Wenig/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
President Donald Trump’s close assistant Natalie Harp was criticized in a recent political speech by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA). When a former Trump adviser took umbrage at the attack, a former prosecutor seemed unable to contain his mirth at the apparent double-standard.
“He didn't attack a young woman for doing her job,” Bryan Lanza, who served as Communications Director for President Donald J. Trump's Transition Team, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Monday. “That young woman, Natalie — she has parents who are probably appalled by Ossoff's behavior today, and by what he implied. So I think, you know, where we've seen the Democratic Party go is a race to the gutter.”
He added, “The Republican Party has sort of been there already — we've floated in that space. But now the Democratic Party, and like Ossoff, who's the leading potential frontrunner for the Democratic Party — people are cheering the fact that he maligned somebody who has sacrificed a significant amount of their livelihood to serve this country.”
Hunt quoted Trump’s adviser Steven Cheung referring to Ossoff as a “c——,” asking if this was not also “gutter behavior.”
“I think they're both the gutter, but that's gutter politics,” Lanza said. “That's where we are today. That's where we've been for a while. It's where we've landed. And that's where we're going to stay.”
Elliot Williams, a former federal prosecutor, began laughing at Lanza’s outrage.
“I love you, man, I appreciate that,” the chuckling Williams said. “I just — it's a little rich, after nearly a decade of Donald Trump, for anyone in the United States to start pointing a finger at someone for rhetoric or language around, frankly, sex.”
In the controversial comment, Ossoff criticized Trump for seeming to care more about his pet political projects and making billions while in office than the thousands of American soldiers fighting the war he waged against Iran.
“He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” Ossoff said, referring to how Trump snuck off Air Force One with Harp after Israel reported a potential assassination attempt against him.
In response to this, Cheung insulted Ossoff with sexual slurs, then closed by describing him as a “radical, extremist Dumocrat.”
Earlier in the CNN segment, Lanza told Hunt that Republicans would love to be able to characterize Democrats as extreme, such as by running against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as their presidential nominee in 2028.
“First of all, my take as a Republican operative is: bring on AOC,” Lanza said. “We would love to run against AOC in 2028, because her positions are outside the mainstream of America — they're more in line with San Francisco, and this country has rejected that kind of politics.”