Former Fox News analyst Ralph Peters spoke with Anderson Cooper tonight about President Donald Trump‘s attacks on the press and the comments he and lawyer Rudy Giuliani are making about collusion not being a crime.

“Collusion outright may not be a crime in and of itself,” he said, “but, Anderson, treason is a crime. Collaborating and conspiring with a hostile foreign power against the United States is a crime. Receiving material support, clandestine material support from a hostile foreign power is a crime.”

Peters expressed alarm at how, at least for him, there’s a question of whether the President of the United States “committed treason.”

He said there has to be some focus on the big picture here instead of Trump’s “clownish antics” and attacks on the press:

“Consider what a brilliant move it is to attack the press as the enemy of the people. Instead of having the spotlight on Trump and his alleged misdeeds––his daily misdeeds against this country, it turns against the press, the ‘lügenpresse,’ as Goebbels would have said, or ‘the enemy of the people.’ ‘Enemy of the people’ is a loaded term. It does go back to Roman times. But in the modern era, the first person I can find who really used it is Robespierre in the French revolution, a master of the guillotine… [and] under Stalin during the purges, if you were called an enemy of the people, it was a death sentence. And given all of Trump’s other ties to Russia and things Russian and people associated with Russia, it hardly seemed a coincidence that he calls our press the enemy of the people.”

Peters said the press is certainly not above criticism, but added, “Without a free press as our Founding Fathers recognized, democracy cannot function.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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