Civil rights activist and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that Americans should have “some concern” about how the FBI is running its probe into Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
It wasn’t the most enthusiastic defense of Cohen, but worth pointing out since Turner is a Democrat and a Bernie Sanders ally. Host Jake Tapper asked her about what she thought about the FBI’s raid on Cohen last Monday. She said it concerned her a “little” and it remained to be seen if there were any abuses, but, she added, “certainly, throughout the history of this country, especially where it comes to African-American folks, I mean, Black Panthers, Dr. King, Malcolm X, and other civil rights freedom fighters. You can see that sometimes the government can go too far in its effort and be skewed one way.”
Again, it wasn’t exactly a defense of Cohen, but for Turner, that was beside the point.
“Now that’s not to say that the Cohen incident is parallel to that [abuses of African-American freedom fighters]“ she said. “But as American citizens, we should have some concern for how this goes, even if it’s against somebody we don’t like or like–It’s not about like or dislike. It is about how we operate as a government.”
FBI agents famously sent Dr. Martin Luther King a letter in which he was told to kill himself. During the civil rights era, the agency put a lot of resources into taking down civil rights activists.
[Screengrab via CNN]
