Last updated on June 12th, 2021 at 05:03 am
An Interior Department investigation claimed that Lafayette Park wasn’t violently cleared so Trump could stage a photo-op. They were going to clear the park anyway.
When federal police officers violently cleared protesters from the city’s Lafayette Park in June 2020, they did it so a contractor could install fencing — not to let President Donald Trump hold a photo opportunity at a nearby church, an investigation by the Interior Department’s inspector general has found.
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That finding, published Wednesday, is likely to surprise many critics of Trump, who have long asserted that the president or his attorney general ordered the operation to pave the way for an act of political theater. That is also the central allegation of a federal lawsuit by Black Lives Matter against the Justice Department.
No one should buy this excuse from the Interior Department investigator. They want the American people to believe that it was all a big coincidence and that the Justice Department had no idea that Trump would be staging the photo-op.
None of this makes sense when one considers that the Interior Department is suggesting that the park was going to be cleared anyway to put up fencing and it just so happened that Donald Trump who had been railing and threatening violence against the protesters also decided to walk through the park to stage a photo-op.
Only a partisan fool would accept this finding at face value. It was all a big coincidence, according to the Interior Department watchdog, which is why Congress needs to look at what happened in Lafayette Park.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
