After news broke this week that three CNN reporters had been fired because of problems with a story about Donald Trump and Russia, former Republican Colorado Sen. Shawn Mitchell entertained the notion in a social media post that “the guillotines will be kept busy” taking care of “hack reporters and seditious leakers” if there’s karmic justice in the world, though he later said he was just kidding.

“Three CNN employees forced to resign over a Trump/Russia fake news story. There are so many,” Mitchell wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday morning. “If Karma is waking up, the trundle carts will start filling and rolling, and the guillotines will be kept busy accommodating hack reporters and seditious leakers, by and large fiction-writing, seditious leakers.”

Mitchell, a Broomfield attorney known for his outspoken conservative and libertarian-leaning views, served 14 years in the Colorado Legislature – three terms in the House and then two terms in the Senate – before facing  term limits in 2012.

“Of course I’m kidding,” Mitchell told Colorado Politics. “It’s a figure of speech meaning if everyone who is publishing fake news about Trump gets fired, then more heads are going to roll. I wasn’t calling for direct action against reporters. I was saying those might be the first three of others if the standard is publishing false stories about Trump.”

“That was not literal by any means, and I’m not meaning to relive the French Revolution,” he added with a laugh.

Mitchell’s post earned dozens of favorable reactions from Facebook users, including a thumbs-up from Jerry Natividad, a Lakewood businessman who ran in last year’s crowded Republican U.S. Senate primary.

Two senior Republican strategists, however, told Colorado Politics they were alarmed by Mitchell’s remarks and maintained it didn’t matter if he later said he was only joking.

“Former Senator Mitchell’s comments were extreme and deeply disturbing, even if they were in jest,” one GOP consultant said. “A free press is a cornerstone of our Republic – something that ought to be celebrated and protected. Sen. Mitchell should immediately retract his comments and apologize for his dangerous rhetoric.”

Another said Mitchell was forgetting that words “shape our collective attitude and actions.”

“I don’t know what’s more appalling: a former Republican legislator ‘joking’ about beheading members of the media, or the fact that no one even cared enough to decry the post,” he said. “Pretty hard to take ourselves seriously with toxic approaches like these infiltrating the local, state and national ‘conservative’ conversation on media.”

It isn’t the first time Mitchell’s comments have drawn criticism. He apologized in 2009 after suggesting that a witness at a committee hearing “relieve” his nervousness by “imagining the chairwoman in her underwear,” referring to Democratic state Sen. Morgan Carroll – she was elected to chair Colorado’s Democratic Party in March – adding that’s what he did when he was nervous.

– Ernest.Luning@coloradopolitics.com