White House rips MSNBC's Joe Scarborough for 'Nazi' comment

The White House criticized MSNBC star Joe Scarborough Friday after the "Morning Joe" host compared the methods used in current immigration policy to the Nazis. (YouTube)

The White House came out swinging Friday against MSNBC star Joe Scarborough after the former Republican congressman compared the methods used in current immigration policy to the Nazis.

Speaking about White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’ Thursday press briefing – in which she sparred with reporters over the separation of families attempting to try to enter the southern border – Scarborough accused Sanders of excessive lying on his "Morning Joe" program.

“So why is she lying this much?” Scarborough asked. “I know children are being ripped from their mother’s arms, even while they’re being breast-fed. I know children are being marched away to showers, marched away to showers. Being told they are — just like the Nazis — said that they were taking people to the showers and then they never came back,” he said.

“You think they would use another trick like 'Hey, got a slurpee room over there.' 'We’re going to take them to get a slurpee,'” he continued. “That would be better than 'We’re marching them to the showers and we’ll be right back' and they never come back.”

“It is appalling that Joe Scarborough would compare sworn federal law enforcement officers— who put their lives on the line every day to keep American people safe— to Nazis," White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement provided to Fox News. "This is the type of inflammatory and unacceptable rhetoric that puts a target on the backs of our great law enforcement.

“It is also horribly insulting to the memory of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust. Not only is Scarborough’s rhetoric shameful, but his facts are categorically false. When American citizens break the law, they are separated from their children and prosecuted. It’s unclear why Scarborough believes that illegal aliens are entitled to more rights than those afforded to American citizens. While Scarborough is quick to launch into his straight-to-camera outrage over the temporary separation of illegal alien families, he has never shown similar outrage for the permanent separation of American families forever torn apart from their children, who were killed by criminal aliens as a result of Democrats’ open borders policies,” Gidley continued.

“If Joe Scarborough actually cared about keeping illegal alien families together, he would use his platform to support the Trump Administration’s efforts to close loopholes in federal immigration law,” the statement said.

Also during Friday’s segment featuring Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, John Heilemann and Willie Geist, the former Republican parsed if, in his estimation, Sanders was “lying” or simply “ignorant.”

“For somebody quoting the Bible, as much as she’s quoting the Bible, that’s just why I hope that she’s just completely ignorant, and isn’t lying on purpose to the American people that many times, Mika, that would be terrible,” he said.

“There’s a commandment against the lying,” Scarborough said later in the conversation.

“It’s also not biblically based that you rip children from their parents. I believe it was Jesus Christ of Nazareth who said ‘let the little children come.'”

A request for comment from Scarborough was not immediately returned.