U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he and Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney

President Donald Trump is exhibiting a pattern of leniency toward domestic terrorists who believe in far-right causes, according to one of his former staffers.

During a Wednesday segment on MSNBC, Miles Taylor — who was chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during Trump's first term – commented on the Trump administration's recent suspension of two Department of Justice prosecutors who sought to sentence Taylor Taranto, a pardoned January 6 rioter found guilty of weapons charges and other crimes earlier this year. He argued that the harsh treatment of federal prosecutors for simply doing their jobs was part of Trump's agenda of looking after people who share his political values — no matter their crimes.

"Donald Trump is coddling assassins because he can," Taylor said. "... They are coddling these assassins because they don't worry about any implications of giving a pass to these people."

Taylor brought up the fact that one of the participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol was recently charged with trying to assassinate House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), and connected that to the punishment of the prosecutors who tried to sentence Taranto. He also observed that he routinely ran into obstacles during Trump's first term when trying to get the DHS to focus on far-right domestic terrorism.

"The FBI and our agents at DHS were telling us there was a spike in domestic violent extremism. And primarily it was coming from the right," Taylor said. "... They told us and they told the White House, there is a growing right-wing extremist movement. And you know what the response was? We're not going to talk about that in the national counterterrorism strategy. They didn't want to talk about it unless it was coming from the left."

Taylor also cautioned that Trump's talk of pursuing a third term in office should be taken seriously, and said Americans need only look to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the Trump v. United States case that gave him absolute criminal immunity for "official acts" as evidence that Trump believes he can ignore the law in order to remain in the White House.

"The president's not joking when he says he wants to stay president of the United States. And scenarios like the justice laid out there are very credible," he said. "If past is prologue, we know Donald Trump is willing to abrogate the Constitution, to hold on to power."

Watch the segment below:

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