US President Donald Trump embraces the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, at a campaign event in January 2016. Photo: Reuters / Brian Snyder.

A disgraced former Arizona sheriff who achieved global fame after he was pardoned by US President Donald Trump three years ago announced on Wednesday that he was setting up a new “watchdog” organization focused on radicals — with the “Jewish left” among the specific target groups identified.

Joe Arpaio claimed in a statement that law enforcement in the US was under assault from an alliance of “socialists, communists, African-American anti-white separatists, radical Muslims, radicals of the Jewish left, anarchists, atheists, and other leftists of all races, sexes and persuasions.”

The statement continued: “Their obvious goal is to destabilize and take down the creation of our Founding Fathers, and in its place install a Marxist state.”

The 88-year-old Arpaio, who describes himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” said that his new organization, which calls itself “America’s Sheriff,” had been “founded to defend America’s Judeo-Christian heritage as depicted in the Bible, where God looks to the counselors and judges to restore the Tarnished City to the Faithful City.”

His partner in the enterprise is Larry Klayman, a lawyer who identifies as a “Jewish Christian.”

Arpaio made headlines in 2017 when he was convicted by a federal judge for criminal contempt of court for having willfully violated a 2011 injunction that barred his officers in Maricopa County, Arizona, from stopping and detaining Latino motorists solely on suspicion that they were in the country illegally.

Trump granted Arpaio clemency before he was to be sentenced, marking the first pardon of his presidency.

Arpaio was ousted from office by Democrat Paul Penzone in 2016. In 2018, Arpaio failed in his bid to replace John McCain, the late Republican senator from Arizona who died earlier in that year.

Earlier this month, Arpaio was defeated in an attempt to win his old job back in an election primary. He was passed over in favor of a former aide, 38-year-old Jerry Sheridan, who shares many of Arpaio’s hardline positions on law enforcement.