A former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton compared an argument made by President Trump’s impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz to ones made by genocidal regimes.

Joe Lockhart, 60, bashed Dershowitz, 81, for claiming on Wednesday that an alleged quid pro quo to help officials get reelected was in the “ public interest.”

“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, and, mostly, you're right. Your election is in the public interest,” Dershowitz said. “And, if a president did something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Touting his own experience on campaigns, Lockhart said that Dershowitz’s argument reminded him of dictators such as Adolf Hitler.

“There is always the sense that, 'Boy, if we win, it’s better for the country,' but that doesn’t give you the license to commit crimes or do things that are unethical, so it was absurd,” Lockhart said on CNN.

“What I thought when I was watching it was, 'This is un-American,'” he continued. “This is what you hear from Stalin, this is what you hear from Mussolini, this is what you hear from Hitler, all of the authoritarian people who rationalized, in some cases genocide, based on what was in the public interest. It was startling.”

