Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a Senator from Vermont, said during a Monday night interview on CNN that President Donald Trump’s killing of Iranian terrorist Qassim Suleimani was like Russian President Vladimir Putin assassinating Russian dissidents.

Sanders’s remarks come after Trump authorized the U.S. military’s drone last week on Suleimani, who has murdered hundreds of American soldiers in acts of terrorism and has wounded thousands more.

“If Suleimani was a non-state actor, not a general, an official, a high-ranking official in the Iranian government, would it be different in your mind?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Sanders.

“I’m not a lawyer on these things, it might be, but this guy is you know, was, as bad as he was, an official of the Iranian a government and you unleash then if China does that you know if Russia does that, you know Russia has been implicated under Putin with assassinating dissidents,” Sanders responded. “So once you’re in the business of assassination you unleash some very very terrible forces.”

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