Troubling op-ed in Trump in-law’s newspaper calls for FBI crackdown on anti-Trump protests

Jared Kushner's newspaper, the New York Observer, ran an op-ed last week that called for a FBI crackdown on the anti-Trump protests that have swept the nation, AlterNet reports.

Kushner, who is Donald Trump's son-in-law and married to Ivanka, bought the Observer in 2006. Just last week, the paper was described as the "propaganda arm of the Trump administration," by Mediaite contributor Justin Bargona.

The Observer op-ed, written by Austin Bay — a former U.S. Army Reserve colonel and current adjunct professor at the University of Texas in Austin — calls on FBI Director James Comey to investigate "the violence and political thuggery that continue to mar the presidential election’s aftermath."

This includes a crackdown on protests and a thorough investigation into whether protest efforts have "ties to organizations demanding vote recounts."

Bay writes, "The hard left’s violent reaction to Donald Trump’s election is vile and dangerous. Peaceful protests? No, the demonstrators vandalize and destroy." He also calls out several so-called Democratic Party operatives, such as political consultant Robert Creamer, whom Bay refers to as a "political terrorist."

Bay also calls out the Black Lives Matter movement, George Soros, and Jill Stein. He writes that there should be a thorough investigation into electorate intimidation across the country, noting that "members of the Electoral College are being harassed and threatened by angry, vicious (and likely Democratic Party) malcontents."

"Identifying electors and then attempting to intimidate them into switching their votes is an ipso facto effort to overturn a national election," he alleges in the piece.

Due to the Observer's association with the Trump White House, calls for an investigation into anti-Trump organizing raise questions, namely that such a probe could pose a threat to the First Amendment.