Rep. Mike Garcia, a Republican currently running for re-election in a competitive race in the Santa Clarita area, drew outrage after comparing the Biden administration and the Democratic Congressional majority to the Nazi regime.
During an Aug. 18 appearance on "The Sara Carter Show," a right-leaning podcast, the host asked Garcia about a recent speech he made at the Reagan Library and his take on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan one year ago.
But when the host brought up concerns that federal bureaucracies could target political enemies — a reference to the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month — the California Republican said that Democrats are “acting more like a Third Reich than they are the United States.”
“They’re not doing this to try to get a reckoning or to bring justice and have someone held accountable. They do it for political purposes,” he said. “This is literally tyranny of a majority right now that is acting more like a Third Reich than they are the United States.”
As recently as Monday, Magistrate Judge Brice Reinhart, who signed off on the search warrant, said he was confident in his decision to do so “after finding probable cause that evidence of multiple federal crimes would be found at the premises.”
“Having carefully reviewed the Affidavit before signing the Warrant, I was — and am — satisfied that the facts sworn by the affiant are reliable," he wrote in a court filing Monday.
According to a report from The New York Times Monday evening, more than 150 documents confiscated from Trump’s home earlier this month were classified, and that over 300 classified documents in total have been retrieved from the former president since the beginning of the year.
Garcia struck a much more muted tone in an interview with Spectrum News about the search last week, ahead of the release of key documents related to the search.
“I’ve been very clear that this seems like an overextension of the FBI. I don’t know what they possibly could have thought is down there that would warrant a raid of this matter on a former president,” Garcia said outside the Capitol on Aug. 12. “We’ll see where the chips fall, what information comes out.”
“I think what the American people want is transparency,” he added. “And I think what the American people believe right now is that this isn’t a transparent process here,” he said. “So we’ll continue to look for information and, you know, objectivity and fairness is what this nation is founded on. Every individual citizen has rights. And so there’s a lot of people who are fearful right now because of this.”
Garcia’s office referred Spectrum News to Garcia’s campaign for comment on his remarks, but our phone call was not returned.
Christy Smith, Garcia’s Democratic opponent, called his remarks on the podcast “repugnant” in a statement to Spectrum News.
“At a time when antisemitism is rising throughout the country, Mike’s repugnant remarks trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust,” Smith said. “They also dangerously fuel the flames of extremist right-wing violence against the FBI and other public safety officers, another example of the way he continues to deliberately undermine and delegitimize law enforcement when the law is applied to people he supports. Voters in CA-27 will reject his blatant extremism this November.”
Smith and Garcia, who faced off in 2020 for Garcia’s current seat, are locked in a heated race for the newly redistricted California 27th congressional district. Smith lost to Garcia by just 333 votes.