Republicans are ganging up with Democrats in a bid to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Donald Trump, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., charged Thursday.
"What we're on the verge of, I'm afraid, is a constitutional crisis brought on by the Democrats and Republicans colluding to impeach Donald Trump and use everything imaginable to get there," Tancredo told Newsmax TV host Bill Tucker on "America Talks Live."
"The president has a lot of enemies in the Republican Party, in the Senate, and all they need is a couple to join the Democrats in that call [for a special prosecutor], and they can shut down everything until they create one."
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Democrats want a completely independent investigator to look into whether Trump's campaign staff colluded with the Russian government to help tip the 2016 presidential election.
The calls have grown louder — with some Republicans chiming in — since Trump fired FBI director James Comey on Tuesday. Just days before his abrupt dismissal, Comey had reportedly asked for additional funding to widen the FBI's probe of Team Trump.
Tancredo said by bringing in a special prosecutor, Congress would be creating "a brand new bureaucracy in a way."
"You fund it with millions of dollars, they never finish really doing their job, and they want to expand everywhere," Tancredo said. "It becomes a fishing expedition because you've got lots of people employed, a guy making a lot of money, and wants to make a name for himself. Sometimes that's the case.
"It could end up that this thing never does get finally solved. So, it's a mess, there's no two ways about it, but I believe [Comey] certainly should have been fired. Look, everybody talks about how it's chaos in Washington because of Trump. No, it's chaos because of people like Comey."
Tancredo labeled Comey "a bizarre goofball head" as head of the FBI.
"Honestly, regardless of all the policy decisions he may have made or not made, the fact is just listening to him created the optics of a pinball sort of discussion," Tancredo said. "I mean he was all over the place constantly. He did a lot of bizarre things, and that's the only way I can describe them.
"He spoke in a way that did not give confidence to almost anyone that was listening to him, and so, yeah, there was chaos. The chaos was coming, I think, from the head of it."
Tancredo believes that same chaos has hit other agencies as well, as they become further politicized.
"It isn't just what's happening in the FBI," Tancredo said. "[It's] the politicization of this bureaucracy and especially of the bureaucracy that it deals with national security.
"This is the most, I think, dangerous thing I have seen in a long, long time in government . . . It was in the IRS, it's the Bureau of Land Management. You look across the government today.
"I have a bumper sticker that says 'I miss the America I grew up in.' And I miss the America I grew up in where you actually trusted these agencies of government. The FBI, when they said something, you believed it . . . I think a very, very scary situation for the president and for the nation."
Tancredo, who unsuccessfully sought the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, said he has been hopeful Trump could fulfill his promise to 'drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C.
"The promise that Trump made . . . was one of the most, I don't know, hopeful things he said," Tancredo told Tucker.
"I didn't know how he was going to do that — 'drain the swamp' — because I served in the Reagan administration, and I will tell you, the ability for anybody to actually pull the plug on that swamp is very, very difficult. Even the president of the United States.
"These people are embedded into these organizations. It's what [former President Barack] Obama has done. He has created a situation where it is almost impossible to drain that swamp and where his minions are working not for the benefit of the organization, but for the benefit of a political ideology."
Tancredo, a columnist at the conservative news website Breitbart, called this week's turmoil "the most scary situation we have ever faced."
"A president cannot have a Department of Justice, or an FBI, or the CIA, or NSA acting in ways where he can't trust them," Tancredo said.
"What would you do when you're president of the United States and you're getting your daily briefing, and you're thinking, 'Do I really believe this guy? And what can I really tell him? Because I don't trust that agency.' I mean, my God man, this is scary stuff."