Arizona’s top prosecutor is investigating whether Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump violated state laws for suggesting that one of his most prominent critics should face “gunfire” in combat.
Trump has been widely criticised for comments he made about former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney at a campaign event in Arizona on Thursday.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Cheney. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
On Friday, speaking to a local TV station, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said Trump might have violated state laws that prohibit death threats.
“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analysing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.
Mayes said it was not yet clear if Trump’s comment amounted to protected free speech or a criminal threat.
“That’s the question, whether it did cross the line. It’s deeply troubling,” Mayes said. “It is the kind of thing that riles people up, and that makes our situation in Arizona and other states more dangerous.”
Cheney endorsed Democrats
Cheney, a former top Republican in the US House of Representatives, has endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and called the former president “a danger”.
Harris told reporters the comments were a sign Trump has become increasingly unhinged.
“Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified and unqualified to be president,” she said in Madison, Wisconsin.
Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said his remarks were misinterpreted.
“President Trump is 100 percent correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves,” she said.
Trump goes after former VP
At a rally in Warren, Michigan, earlier in the day, Trump attacked Harris and Cheney again, and this time his comments included her father – former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“They want the Arab American vote. They want to get the Muslim votes, so she picks Liz Cheney whose father virtually destroyed the Middle East,” he said.
He added: “It’s easy for her to say she wants to start wars from the comfort of her nice home, or her father’s lavish home, that he got from killing a big portion of the Middle East. You know that, right? You know he headed up a company, that was a big company, a big beneficiary of the wars.”
Cheney was vice president under President George W Bush and played a key role in the so-called “war on terror” – the US response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Before he served as vice president, Cheney was the former CEO of Halliburton, a multinational oil services company that won multibillion-dollar contracts with the US military in Iraq.
Cheney has also refused to back Trump’s third presidential run and has endorsed Harris.
Both Harris and Trump held evening campaigns in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Friday as part of a final push for votes in the crucial swing state.
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