Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke had strong words for MSNBC’s Al Sharpton Thursday morning on “Fox & Friends.”
“I don’t expect anything intelligent to come out of the mouth of Al Sharpton,” Clarke said in response to news that the Department of Justice won’t press civil rights charges against former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Steve Doocy had just played a clip of Sharpton’s Dec. 3 comments following the Eric Garner grand jury decision.
“Al Sharpton ought to just shut up and go back into the gutter he came from,” Clarke added, calling Sharpton a “charlatan.”
Sharpton’s name has become a popular one on Fox News in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting in Missouri and the Eric Garner chokehold death in Staten Island, New York. Both deaths took place in 2014 and were the source of wall-to-wall coverage on cable news.
For Sharpton’s part, he denounced violence on his MSNBC program “PoliticsNation” after two NYC police officers were assassinated by a lone gunman angered over Ferguson and Staten Island.
“Let me be perfectly clear — this was an act of senseless violence,” Sharpton said after the assassination in December. “We are all outraged and saddened by the deaths of these police officers. Any use of the names of Eric Garner or Michael Brown in conjunction with violence or the killing of police is reprehensible.”
MSNBC declined to comment to TheWrap‘s regarding the Sheriff’s statement.
For the record: A previous version of this story misidentified the sheriff. TheWrap regrets the error.
Watch the “Fox & Friends” segment below.