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ADL Calls on Trump to Apologize for ‘Nazi Germany’ Reference

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) slammed President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday for comparing U.S. intelligence agencies to Nazi Germany.

“The President-Elect’s use of Nazi Germany to make a political analogy is not only an inappropriate comparison on the merits, but it also coarsens our discourse and diminishes the horror of the Holocaust,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “ADL always has maintained that glib comparisons to Nazi Germany are offensive and a trivialization of the Holocaust.”

On Wednesday morning, following the publication of unverified documents containing allegations about his activities in Russia, Trump claimed himself a victim of U.S. intelligence officials, invoking Nazi Germany. “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public,” Trump tweeted. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

During a press conference at Trump Tower – as his son-in-law Jared Kushner was looking on – the President-elect doubled down, comparing himself to the.victims of Nazi persecution during WWII. “I think it was disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake” to be leaked to the press, Trump said. “That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”

The White House called the attack on the U.S. intelligence community “deeply misguided.”

“As President Obama has said many times, the men and women of our intelligence community are patriots,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest.

ADL’s Greenblatt called on Trump to “explain his intentions or apologize for the remark.”

Steven Goldstein, executive director of The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, also urged the President-elect to “retract his tweet and apologize to survivors and to our entire nation.”

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