The secret service is investigating Donald Trump’s chief adviser on veteran’s issues after he declared on Wednesday that Hillary Clinton “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason”, the most extreme statement yet during a Republican national convention that has made the presumptive Democratic nominee the party’s top target.

Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative and a New Hampshire delegate at the convention, made the comments on The Kuhner Report, a Boston-area radio show hosted by Jeffrey T Kuhner, a radio personality who styles himself as “liberalism’s worst nightmare”.

“I’m a veteran that went to Desert Shield, Desert Storm,” Baldasoro said on Tuesday. “I’m also a father who sent a son to war, to Iraq, as a marine corps helicopter avionics technician. Hillary Clinton, to me, is the Jane Fonda of the Vietnam.”

Baldasaro went on to call Clinton “a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi. She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting backup security. Something’s wrong there.

“This whole thing disgusts me,” he concluded. “Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

Reached by the Boston Globe, Baldasaro stood by his comments “without a doubt”.

“When you take classified information on a server that deals with where our state department, special forces, CIA, whatever in other countries, that’s a death sentence for those people if that information gets in the hands of other countries or the terrorists,” Baldasaro said. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s information for the enemy. In the military, shot, firing squad. So I stand by what I said.”

Secret service spokesman Robert Hoback said the agency was aware of the comments and “will conduct the appropriate investigation”.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Trump and his campaign did not agree with Baldasaro’s remarks.

The comments, coming from a chief adviser for a signature issue of Trump’s campaign, are far from the only incendiary remarks directed at the former secretary of state during the Republican national convention, where Clinton has loomed large. On Superior Avenue in downtown Cleveland, men hawking T-shirts reading “Trump This Bitch!” and “Hillary Sucks, But Not Like Monica” have done brisk business.

The anti-Clinton fervor has often dominated the primetime stage of the convention itself. During a highly charged speech on Tuesday night, New Jersey governor Chris Christie presided over arena-wide chants of “Guilty!” and “Lock her up!” as the former federal prosecutor argued in a mock trial “the case now, on the facts, against Hillary Clinton”.

Later that evening, the former presidential candidate Ben Carson departed from his prepared remarks to imply that Clinton admired Satan.

“One of her heroes, one of her mentors was Saul Alinsky,” Carson said, referring to the father of grassroots organizing whose book, Rules for Radicals, Clinton once cited in a college thesis. In that book, Alinsky calls Lucifer “the very first radical”.



“Are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?” Carson said. “Think about that.”