Preet Bharara Slams Doug Collins Over ‘Cheap Shot’ in Brutal Op-Ed: ‘Not Sure You Are Fit to be Anyone’s Congressman’

CNN senior legal analyst Preet Bharara called out Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) on Thursday in an op-ed and subsequent appearance on Anderson Cooper 360°, after the congressman claimed Democrats “are in love with terrorists” and “mourn” assassinated Iranian Quds Force Supreme Commander Qasem Soleimani “more than they mourn our Gold Star families.”

In an op-ed published at CNN.com, Bharara wrote to Collins, “You are not my congressman, and while I am ever thankful for that fact, after seeing your performance on Fox News on Wednesday night, I’m not sure you are fit to be anyone’s congressman.”

“I realize that you are a politician and that hyperbolic, hyperpartisan claptrap is the unfortunate fashion of the day. But even allowing for the new normal of nastiness in political rhetoric, your casual slur of countless good Americans hits a new bottom,” he continued. “Americans can, in good faith, differ about the legality or efficacy of killing Soleimani. That doesn’t make them unpatriotic or lovers of terrorists. It is hostility to differences of opinion that is un-American.”

“You are not a talk radio host or a carnival barker. You are a pastor, an attorney and a sitting member of Congress. Therefore, the evidence would suggest you should know better,” Bharara declared, adding “To utter such garbage, which you know to be false and defamatory, goes against all the training and teaching you must have received. But you got your cheap shot across, and perhaps that’s all that matters to you.”

After the op-ed was published, Bharara joined Anderson Cooper on CNN to further criticize Collins’ remarks.

“There’s been a lot of rhetoric. A lot of poisonous rhetoric. A lot of barbs,” he proclaimed. “And I know politics is a tough game, as I said in the piece, I worked for a scrappy tough politician in the Senate for four years, so I get it. But something about that, about the equating of people who are of a particular ideological or political persuasion as being lovers of terrorists based on nothing, I think just crossed a different line.”

“I try to be measured here on CNN and on my Twitter account, and I kind of lost it a little bit yesterday because it’s a bridge too far,” he continued. “It was stupid, it was self-defeating, it borders on pathological. You don’t need to say that to make a point and be persuasive, it’s just debasing to himself, debasing to democracy, and debasing to his party.”

Watch above via CNN.