In a previous column, I looked at the conclusions from that report. To recap, the report found evidence that the Secret Service and UiS. Park Police had previously arranged to expand a security perimeter around the White House, and that the agencies decided to clear the park 20 minutes before a city curfew to install new fencing during daylight. But that reason makes little sense, especially given that every other decision the agencies made that day all but guaranteed that the fence could only be installed at night. The report endorses an exonerating explanation over a more damning explanation that’s far more consistent with the actions of the officials and police agencies involved.
But what the IG’s office didn’t investigate is just as important as what it did. The investigators didn’t interview anyone from the White House. They didn’t interview then-Attorney General William P. Barr, who appeared in the park minutes before it was cleared and was captured on video speaking with the Park Police commander. Citing sources within the administration, multiple news organizations (including The Post) have reported that Barr gave orders to clear the park. The IG’s report dismissed all of that, relying instead on the word of Park Police officials.
The investigators also didn’t interview anyone from the Secret Service. This is important both for what the report says, and what it doesn’t. The report points out that Secret Service agents began clearing the park before the Park Police officers were ready (although several police agencies participated, the Park Police was in charge of the operation). But the report doesn’t investigate why, nor does it look into how the Park Police reacted. Did officers go along with the early clearance? Did they object? Did they ask why?
In fact, the investigators didn’t interview anyone from most of the police agencies involved. That includes the Bureau of Prisons, which at Barr’s request sent “cell extraction” teams, paramilitary units that are trained to break up prison riots and respond to violent prisoners, and are completely inappropriate for policing protests. If the aim here wasn’t an intimidating show of strength, why send teams that are primarily trained to suppress with violence?
In the weeks after the incident, several members of the D.C. National Guard came forward to say that they too saw no violence at the protest, and that the police actions were unjustified and unnecessarily violent. If investigators interviewed these troops, it isn’t noted in the report. The investigators did apparently interview Maj. Adam DeMarco, the National Guard’s liaison to the Park Police for the operation, who has also criticized how the park was cleared. But the report only mentions DeMarco in a footnote, and only to note a concession he made that benefits the administration. It makes no mention of his criticisms.
The report also looks only into why the park was cleared. It does not address the how — whether the level of force the police agencies used was appropriate. The report says this is because investigators didn’t want to interfere with ongoing Park Police investigations. But the Park Police has a long history of opacity and leniency when it investigates its own officers. The public outcry that moved the IG to investigate in the first place was just as much about the level of force as the reason it was deployed. Here again, the IG shows enormous deference to the very agency it’s investigating.
The report also didn’t contain interviews with any of the protesters, journalists or St. John’s clergy who were swept up in the clearance. The entire purpose of an inspector general is to expose government waste and abuse. It’s bizarre that an IG’s office would investigate such a high-profile incident and not interview a single victim of the alleged abuse.
The failure to interview any of the people on the receiving end of the police action is especially glaring, given that the report also reverently cites comments from Park Police officers and administration officials claiming that the police actions were justified because the protesters were violent. Yet nearly all the incidents of violence documented in the report occurred before June 1 or in other parts of the District. It’s understandable how violence on previous nights or in other places might have spurred the decision to expand the perimeter around the White House, but, again, that doesn’t justify the decision to clear the park before the curfew, and with such force. You don’t subject peaceful people to police violence simply because some other people standing in the same area may have been violent on previous days.
The report’s evidence of violence on June 1 is even less persuasive. It claims that a handful of protesters threw rocks and eggs but doesn’t offer any specific documentation for those incidents, such as a timestamp on a video. The only documentation of protest misbehavior the report provides is in the form of redacted photos that apparently show protesters sitting or standing on a bike rack and a “comfort station,” both of which were apparently not allowed at the time, but neither of which is an act of violence.
The report also cites radio chatter on the day of the clearance in which Park Police officers claimed to have seen a protester wearing a bulletproof vest and another carrying a baseball bat. Again, neither example is documented. But more to the point, neither of those things is illegal, and neither would justify evicting even those specific people from the park, much less subjecting everyone in the area to a violent mass eviction.
Moreover, contrary to the claims of Park Police and the Trump administration, there’s overwhelming evidence that the protest on June 1 was peaceful. Hours of video footage obtained and reviewed by The Post, the New York Times and the House Natural Resources Committee show almost no violence at all among the protesters, save for a few thrown water bottles. Accounts from journalists, other protesters and St. John’s clergy also reported a peaceful protest over the course of several hours.
In justifying the decision not to interview protesters, administration officials or the other police agencies involved, the report points out that the IG’s jurisdiction is limited to oversight of the Park Police. That certainly explains why investigators weren’t able to interview Barr, the Secret Service or other participating police agencies, though they also don’t appear to have tried.
But if that’s all true, narrow jurisdiction and narrow investigative authority call for a narrow interpretation of the report’s conclusions. Instead, a narrowly focused report has been interpreted to draw an extraordinarily broad conclusion — that the park clearing had nothing to do with the photo op, and that the media narrative is a lie.
But here's what we do know:
— We know that in a phone call with state governors just hours before the clearance that was supposed to have been about covid, Trump obsessed about the protests, and implored the governors to use violence. “You have to dominate,” he told them. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. … If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re gonna walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in DC, we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But we’re going to have total domination.”
— We know that Trump and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had an angry confrontation over Trump’s demand to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military to crack down on protests around the country.
— We know that Trump is fond of strongmen who abuse their power. He has praised the Chinese government’s crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, for example. He also initially refused to condemn the crackdown on democracy protests in Hong Kong, and reportedly admired Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s willingness to arrest, beat and kill dissidents, and his willingness to deploy the military to put down protest.
The Lafayette Square crackdown was a violent broadside against a protest that had been overwhelmingly peaceful, and whose participants had broken no laws. It was done moments before a planned photo op staged by a president who seemed to relish the idea of beating, injuring and shooting protesters, who had been insulted by a recent article depicting him as a coward, who was reportedly eager to demonstrate strength, and whose attorney general had just visited the very park in question — and who, according to multiple media outlets, gave an explicit order to clear the park for Trump. The photo op couldn’t have happened without the police action, and the chronology of the police action was in near-perfect synchronicity with the photo op, almost down to the minute.
To believe the Trump administration and its defenders, you have to dismiss all of that as one enormous coincidence and believe instead that this really was all about fencing. And to believe that, you also must rely entirely on assurances from a president and an administration that lied to the public on a daily basis, on matters big and small, substantive and absurd, tens of thousands of times.
Read more:
"Opinion" - Google News
July 15, 2021 at 12:59AM
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Opinion | The mystery around what happened in Lafayette Square - The Washington Post
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