Political commentator Pat Buchanan told Newsmax TV on Wednesday that President Donald Trump should have fired FBI Director James Comey and bashed comparisons to the "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973 when President Richard Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor.
"I wasn't shocked, and the outrage I think is, largely, a lot of it is synthetic," Buchanan, 78, who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, told host Bill Tucker on "America Talks Live."
See Bill Tucker on Newsmax TV: Tune in beginning at 12 PM ET to see "America Talks Live" — on FiOS 615, YouTube Livestream, Newsmax TV App from any smartphone, NewsmaxTV.com, Roku, Amazon Fire — More Systems Here
Buchanan's new book is "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
"He's an employee of the president of the United States, of the Department of Justice," he said of Comey. "He's under the president's jurisdiction.
"The president's got a right to fire him. He's been deeply controversial.
"Many of the Democrats who are now complaining about his firing were demanding his firing."
Buchanan also slammed parallels to Nixon's dismissal of independent prosecutor Archibald Cox on Oct. 20, 1973, which also brought the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus.
"I was in the Oval Office with the president that Saturday afternoon," he began in a "Facebook Live" interview with Newsmax TV host Steve Malzberg. "Elliott Richardson was waiting outside to be brought in to be fired.
Story continues below video.
"Nixon had just aided Israel in the Six Day War, [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger was in Moscow, we had lost our vice president [Spiro Agnew] that month – and you had Archibald Cox defying the president over a simple matter of whether he would accept written summaries of the Watergate tapes or the actual tapes.
"Nixon said: 'I don't have any choice, but I can't have [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev watch me be bullied by a member of my Cabinet. I've got to fire him' — and he did."
"But it was a huge event," Buchanan said, later adding "it was far more grave and serious."
"It's absurdity to compare the two or equate the two," he told Malzberg. "One of them is an enormous event in American history — and this is just a removal of a controversial FBI director."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.