Ron Paul: Obama pushing 'martial law,' Holder should be 'fired'

Speaking to conspiracy talk show host Alex Jones on Tuesday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) said he believes that Attorney General Eric Holder should be "immediately fired," and that President Barack Obama is pushing for the legalization of "martial law" in the U.S.

In his comments about Holder, Paul, who's in a close second place among Iowa Republican primary voters, suggested that his role in the "fast and furious" gun-running scandal should be enough to leverage him from office.

"He should be immediately fired and then there should be an investigation to find out if charges should be made," he said. "That's obviously over the top. All these kind of sting operations and false-flag, this is criminal. They do it constantly. I think they were doing that when there was this so-called attempt to kill the Saudi, or, the Iranian ambassador. That kind of stuff. They should be investigated."

He went on to say that although House Republicans are investigating Holder, he wasn't sure if the attorney general would ever face charges. "But I think he deserves to have charges up against him," Paul added.

Holder, who put a stop to the sting operations that saw U.S. agents selling guns to straw buyers, then attempting to track them as they made their way into Mexico, has said he will not resign over the scandal. About 2,000 guns went missing in the investigation. Though several hundred have been recovered, many of them were found at gruesome cartel crime scenes.

The Republican frontrunner also took issue with the inclusion of an "indefinite detention" provision in a defense budget authorization bill that recently made its way through Congress. The provision cements into law the power claimed by the Bush administration and reaffirmed by the Obama administration, letting authorities detain American citizens under military custody, without formal charges against them or access to legal representation.

As a candidate, then-Senator Obama said repeatedly that should not happen in the U.S., but as president he pushed Congress to approve that very power, and created by executive order a system of once-yearly reviews for detainees in military custody. He's threatened to veto the bill, which is currently being renegotiated, but only because it imposes too many checks on the administration's power to detain prisoners.

"You know our government has been involved with the CIA, in overthrowing governments for a long, long time, and of course last spring, I guess it was in February, the administration admitted they could assassinate American citizens," Paul told Jones. "Now they're putting it into law. This, to me, is an extremely wrong way to go. This is a giant step. This should be the biggest news going right now, literally legalizing martial law.

"In our debates, it didn't come up at all. This is the one thing that Rand got stopped: the arrogance of them, trying to push through under voice vote, if you go through a trial and are found innocent, the government wants to put you in prison for life anyway. Fortunately for that, they wanted to do it under voice vote and he finally got a vote on that, and that was canceled out.

"That is arrogance of the administration and neglect of the Congress in using their authority and responsibility, as well as the people's. That's why it's up to us now to wake the people up, because they don't probably realize the significance of it. This is big. This is big."

This video is from The Alex Jones Show, broadcast on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011.