From CNN:
Brennan has publicly talked about that vote -- for Gus Hall for president in the 1970s -- but Trump was more concerned with the '50s on Sunday.
"Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!" Trump said on Twitter.
The President may very well have studied McCarthy; in New York in the '70s, Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn, the lawyer who decades earlier helped McCarthy try to root out communists and allege ties to the Soviet Union.
McCarthy's effort, now seen almost universally as a stain on the country, saw him and Cohn run wild as they ruined lives and ginned up the Red Scare, alleging a communist infiltration in the State Department and producing a list of names he said were the culprits. He later held hearings about alleged communist sympathies in the Army. (Stylistically, McCarthy's secret list of communists and the innuendo he used to frighten Americans with a communist conspiracy theory shares more similarities with Trump's allegations of a "deep state" and his growing list of current and former government officials, including Brennan, whose security clearances Trump has either revoked or is reviewing).
Cohn, by the way, later worked with Roger Stone, an early Trump political ally who now figures in the Mueller investigation.
Trump appearing with Roy Cohn, who died in 1986.
Trump appearing with Roy Cohn, who died in 1986.
Trump's ties to McCarthy are stronger than any comparison of McCarthy to Mueller, who is not a senator trying to use public hearings and reports for political gain, but rather a special counsel who by all accounts is proceeding quietly and methodically.