Former national security advisor John Bolton, seen in February, is scheduled to publish a memoir of his time with the Trump administration on June 23, and the Justice Department is trying to block publication.
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Former national security advisor John Bolton, seen in February, is scheduled to publish a memoir of his time with the Trump administration on June 23, and the Justice Department is trying to block publication.
Mark Humphrey/AP
Seven days before the scheduled June 23 release of a tell-all account of John Bolton’s tenure as President Trump’s national security advisor, the Justice Department late Tuesday mounted a last-ditch effort to block its publication.
A 27-page civil lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against Bolton with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleges that publication of his 592-page book, The Room Where It Happened, would be a violation of nondisclosure agreements he signed and compromise national security.
“[The National Security Council] has determined that the manuscript in its present form contains certain passages—some up to several paragraphs in length—that contain classified national security information,” the filing states. “In fact, the NSC has determined that information in the manuscript is classified at the Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret levels.”
“Accordingly,” it continues, “the publication and release of The Room Where it Happened would cause irreparable harm, because the disclosure of instances of classified information in the manuscript reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States.”
The lawsuit argues that Bolton, who lasted 16 months as Trump’s third national security advisor before being fired in September 2019, had signed a document three days after leaving his White House post acknowledging “that he continued to be ‘prohibited from disclosing any classified or confidential information,’ and that he ‘may not use or disclose nonpublic information’—defined as ‘information gained by reason of [his] federal employment’ and that ‘has not been made available to the general public.’ ”
Bolton is accused in the lawsuit with three counts of breach of contract and fiduciary duty — for allegedly violating prepublication review requirements, for violating his duty not to disseminate classified information, and for unjust enrichment from what the Justice Department says is a book deal “allegedly worth about $2 million.”
The court is asked to order Bolton to request that the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, further delay a publication date that originally was to have been in April so that the NSC can complete its pre-publication review. No time frame is given for how soon that review might be finished.
According to a director with Bolton’s Foundation for American Security and Freedom Super PAC, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday evening had no comment to make about the lawsuit.
In an email, his attorney, Charles Cooper, said, “We are reviewing the Government’s complaint, and will respond in due course.”
It appears, though, that Bolton’s book has already been printed and is being distributed.
“In the months leading up to the publication of The Room Where It Happened, Bolton worked in cooperation with the National Security Council to incorporate changes to the text that addressed NSC concerns,” Simon & Schuster said in a June 10 press release. “The final, published version of this book reflects those changes, and Simon & Schuster is fully supportive of Ambassador Bolton’s First Amendment right to tell the story of his time in the Trump White House.”
A description by the publisher of what the mustachioed, hard-driving former top aide to Trump has written leaves little doubt why the president, with Attorney General Bill Barr at his side, said on Tuesday of Bolton “maybe he’s not telling the truth. He’s been known not to tell the truth a lot.”
In that pre-publication blurb, Simon & Schuster quotes a damning indictment of Trump directly from Bolton’s book.
“‘I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,’ he writes,” according to the publisher.
“In fact,” Simon & Schuster says of Bolton, “he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.”
The book, the imprint adds, “shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government.”
Bolton’s book sales, should the eleventh hour effort to block them fail, could handsomely benefit from the considerable publicity generated by his spat with Trump.
Should that happen, the lawsuit contends, the earnings would not go to Bolton.
It claims that under the nondisclosure agreements he signed, Bolton agreed to “assign to the United States Government all rights, title, and interest, and all royalties, remunerations and emoluments that have resulted or will result or may result from any disclosure, publication or revelation not consistent with the terms” of those agreements.
The emerging bill is expected to be far narrower than the sweeping law enforcement overhaul that Democrats have proposed and far short of what civil rights leaders say is necessary, but its very existence reflects a personal and political journey for Mr. Scott and his view of what can reasonably become law.
“We can all sense the opportunity that is before us,” he said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “More than at any time I can remember, people of all ages and races are standing up together for the idea that Lady Justice must be blind.”
Friends and colleagues say Mr. Scott’s thinking on matters of race actually began to shift much earlier, in 2015, after his hometown, Charleston, confronted two tragedies in quick succession: the shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, and then the massacre by a white supremacist of nine black churchgoers as they prayed at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Now, Republicans are looking to Mr. Scott, 54, to be the party’s leading voice in Congress’s first major debate about policing in a quarter-century, injecting an authoritative conservative voice — who, as he might put it, also happens to be African-American — into the mix.
“He has a particular strength in this moment that other people don’t have,” said Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina who served alongside Mr. Scott. “It’s one thing for a white guy to stand up. It’s a very different thing for a black man to stand up and say, ‘Well, let me tell you about my personal experience.’”
Mr. Scott, who is frequently described as an eternal optimist guided by his faith, has an exceedingly difficult task. He is trying to balance calls from police unions who are resisting changes and civil rights groups that are clamoring for it, as well as conservative members of his own party and liberals like Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and the only other black man in the Senate. He has been quietly keeping Mr. Trump abreast of his work.
In Bethel, Ohio, over the weekend, 80 or so expected demonstrators for a Black Lives Matter protest ended up dwarfed Sunday afternoon by some 700 counterprotesters — motorcycle gangs, “back the blue” groups and proponents of the Second Amendment, village officials said. Some carried rifles, a local news station reported, while others brought baseball bats and clubs. Police said they are investigating about 10 “incidents” from the clashes that followed, including a demonstrator being punched in the head.
Donald Trump faced renewed criticism on Tuesday for what critics said was a “woeful” attempt at police reform that failed to address systemic racism and fell far short of the demands of Black Lives Matter activists seeking fundamental change.
The US president issued an executive order that would discourage police from using chokeholds and create a national database for police misconduct.
But while Trump’s remarks in the White House Rose Garden began with a sombre list of African Americans killed by police, they soon turned into something resembling a campaign speech, touting the stock market and retail sales and arguing “school choice” is the civil rights cause of our time.
The president has been scrambling to respond after the death of George Floyd, an African American killed when a white Minneapolis officer pressed his knee into the his neck for nearly nine minutes. The killing touched off the biggest civil rights uprising for half a century and a moment of national reckoning on racism.
With nine officials at his side, some in law enforcement uniforms, Trump signed an executive order aimed at promoting accountability in law enforcement.
It uses federal government grants to encourage police departments to meet certain standards for use of force, including banning chokeholds – except in cases where an officer is targeted by deadly force.
The order also establishes a database for tracking officers with multiple complaints of misconduct and gives incentives to police departments to involve mental health professionals and social workers in issues of addiction, homelessness and mental illness.
Trump said he had met several families who have lost loved ones in deadly encounters with police officers. But the president, who in the past has called on police to rough people up when they are arrested, and who has denounced protesters as “thugs” and “terrorists”, could not resist his instinct to play to his support base.
Trump bemoaned how many murders in Chicago and Baltimore did not result in arrests. “Americans want law and order,” he said. “They demand law and order. They may not say it. They may not be talking about it but that’s what they want. Some of them don’t even know that’s what they want, but that’s what they want.”
He added: “I strongly oppose the radical and dangerous efforts to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments, especially now when we achieved the lowest recorded crime rates in recent history. Americans know the truth: without police, there is chaos. Without law, there is anarchy.”
There are a “small number of bad police officers”, he added. “They are very tiny. I use the word ‘tiny’. It is a very small percentage. But you have them.”
Democrats condemned the president for lack of ambition. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, said: “Unfortunately, this executive order will not deliver the comprehensive meaningful change and accountability in our nation’s police departments that Americans are demanding.”
Vanita Gupta, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said: “This executive order is a woeful attempt to shift focus from the dangerous rhetoric and policies he has previously promoted. Piecemeal reform effort will not achieve the transformative change needed to heal our country and usher in a new era of public safety in which all communities thrive.”
Police reform proposals are also emerging in Congress. A Democratic plan would limit legal protections for police and ban chokeholds. A Republican plan, drafted by Senator Tim Scott, for a bill with restrictions on chokeholds and other practices is expected to be announced on Wednesday.
Some cities and states are also moving ahead with changes of their own. Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, pledged to change police use-of-force policies and require that officers receive continuous training in how to de-escalate situations.
The announcement came after the police killing of another African American man, Rayshard Brooks, 27, outside a fast-food restaurant on Friday, sparking demonstrations in the city. The restaurant was burned down over the weekend and the officer who shot Brooks was fired.
Bottoms said: “I am often reminded of the words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. There is a ‘fierce urgency of now’ in our communities. It is clear that we do not have another day, another minute, another hour to waste.”
The New York city police department is disbanding the type of plainclothes anti-crime units that were involved in the 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner. New Jersey’s attorney general ordered police to begin divulging names of officers who commit serious disciplinary violations. In Chicago, a panel of residents, activists and one police official will review the police department’s policy on when officers can use force.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mayor Tim Keller said he wanted a new department of social workers and civilian professionals to provide another option when someone calls the emergency number 911. Albuquerque was the scene of violence on Monday night when protesters tried to tear down a bronze statue of a Spanish conquistador outside a museum.
A man was shot and taken to hospital in a critical but stable condition near a confrontation between protesters and a group of armed men to protect the statue of Juan de Oñate before protesters wrapped a chain around it and began tugging on it while chanting: “Tear it down.”
The city announced that the statue would be removed until officials determine next steps. Police said detectives arrested Stephen Ray Baca, 31, on suspicion of aggravated battery.
Statues of Christopher Columbus and Confederate war generals have also been torn down across the nation. A statue of Josephus Daniels, a former newspaper publisher, navy secretary and lifelong white supremacist was taken down in North Carolina.
Lindsey Graham said during opening remarks at a Senate hearing, “Every black man in America feels threatened when they are stopped by the cops. That it’s not 99%, it is 100%.”
The fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta is changing how the city’s citizen watchdog group operates and, after years of criticism that it is a “toothless” body, could further empower it in investigating and recommending disciplinary action against officers.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced a series of administrative orders Monday related to de-escalation and police reform, one of which would send all cases of deadly force by officers to the Atlanta Citizen Review Board, a process that is normally triggered only when someone files a complaint.
An amended ordinance was also presented at a City Council meeting Monday that would, among several other changes, broaden the board’s authority to conduct investigations and hold public hearings; expand the board to include younger members, because their age group often comes into contact with police; and institute an independent “reviewer” who would essentially mediate and make binding rulings when the board and the police department fail to agree on investigations.
Samuel Lee Reid II, the board’s executive director, told NBC News on Tuesday that he supports the measures and believes they can strengthen the board’s guiding purpose, which is to field misconduct and civil rights abuse complaints against police and to open independent investigations. The panel also has subpoena power to interview officers, an important tool that was introduced in 2010, three years after the board was established.
According to the board’s latest data, the Atlanta Police Department has agreed with the board’s findings about 41 percent of the time, but Reid said he believes that should be far higher — at least 75 percent — to show “how serious the department is to address citizen complaints.” (The number was as low as 11 percent in 2015.)
The board received 153 complaints in 2019, a 13 percent increase from 2018. The complaints centered mostly on allegations that officers failed to follow protocol, used excessive force or exhibited questionable conduct. According to board data, the majority of complaints last year were made by Black men over 35, while the majority of law enforcement officers identified in the complaints were Black officers who had more than five years of policing experience.
While the board has four investigators who review complaints before they’re brought before all 13 members for hearings, Reid said, he’d also like the city to hire an analyst to perform audits and conduct studies on why officers might be disciplined only in some cases or not at all, as well as highlight other trends or gaps in reporting.
“We want to dig into that data,” Reid said, adding: “If you want to do this correctly, you need the power and the manpower to do it. We want to catch these issues before it happens again.”
There are about 150 civilian review boards nationwide, most of them associated with larger municipal police agencies and many formed either after high-profile incidents or as responses to patterns of complaints of police brutality or racial bias.
The death of Brooks, 27, during a police encounter Friday night has focused renewed scrutiny on the Atlanta Police Department, which has about 2,000 sworn officers. Chief Erika Shields resigned Saturday night, less than 24 hours after the shooting; Assistant Chief Rodney Bryant is serving as interim chief.
Rayshard Brooks in an undated photo.Stewart Trial Attorneys / via AFP – Getty Images
Brooks’ shooting in a Wendy’s parking lot was captured on security and bodycam video. Police responded to a report that a man had fallen asleep in his car in the drive-thru. Two officers encountered Brooks, and a struggle ensued after they administered a field sobriety test and tried to take Brooks into custody.
Video shows Brooks holding a stun gun as he runs away. He appears to turn around and point the weapon before an officer, Garrett Rolfe, fires at him, hitting him in the back, according to investigators. Rolfe, a six-year veteran of the department, was fired, while the second officer, Devin Brosnan, a veteran of nearly two years, was placed on administrative leave.
Neither officer has been charged. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is reviewing the case.
Atlanta police released Rolfe’s disciplinary record, which shows that he was issued a written reprimand in 2016 related to a use-of-force incident involving a firearm. Details weren’t disclosed. In addition, Rolfe was the subject of four citizen complaints during his career, which didn’t result in any disciplinary action, and he was also involved in vehicle accidents, one of which led to a written reprimand and another to an oral admonishment.
There was also an incident involving the discharge of a firearm in 2015, although it’s unclear how it concluded.
Reid said it wouldn’t be surprising that officers with histories of complaints could remain employed in the Atlanta Police Department, particularly if they are cleared internally and aren’t seeking to be promoted.
But Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, an Atlanta-based organization fighting the criminalizing of Black and brown communities, said that even though there’s an independent police oversight agency, it’s apparent that Atlanta officers with complaints can continue operating in communities and that residents may be left in the dark about how many complaints they have and for what, a disconnect she said she believes doesn’t engender trust.
“We need to rethink what community engagement and community control of policing looks like and how we make accountability of the police something transparent,” Bervera said, adding that there is a role for some form of a review board but that “we have to ask ourselves at this point, does this model work?”
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The Atlanta Citizen Review Board was established after the death of Kathryn Johnston, 92, a Black woman who was killed during a police raid on her home in 2006. Officers, dressed in plainclothes and wearing bulletproof vests, were executing a “no-knock” warrant in connection with a man who they claimed was selling drugs from Johnston’s home. After officers forced their way in, Johnston, a resident of one of Atlanta’s most crime-plagued neighborhoods, opened fire on them and was killed in a shootout, according to reports.
The disturbing case enraged residents after one of the officers admitted to having planted bags of marijuana inside the home after Johnston was killed, as well as having based the warrant on falsified records. Three officers were charged with federal crimes and sentenced, which also galvanized the community to demand police reform and paved the way for the Citizen Review Board.
Proposals to abolish the use of no-knock warrants have been revived in recent weeks as part of policing reform efforts in other cities and states following the death of Breonna Taylor, a young Black woman who was killed by Louisville, Kentucky, police in her home this year.
Vincent Fort, a former Democratic state senator in Georgia who tried unsuccessfully to get a no-knock bill passed, said subsequent police-involved killings and injuries of Atlantans over the years have resulted in board investigations that appeared only to languish for months without meaningful repercussions.
“The administration and City Council made the review board toothless,” Fort said. “The problem with it is, even as they acquired subpoena power over time, there’s a loophole the police use: If I’m on the board and I ask the police for data, documents or even for the officer to appear, all they say is ‘it’s an ongoing investigation.’ And the case just drags on and on.”
“I once told them: ‘You’re a paper tiger. You’re a joke in the community,'” Fort said of the board.
In 2015, the Citizen Review Board drew heat from activists who demanded an investigation into the death of Alexia Christian, a Black woman who was killed in police custody, and criticized the board’s “Don’t Run” campaign, meant to encourage residents not to flee from police. Bottoms, who was a City Council member at the time, had supported the idea of the campaign but said she also felt it was telling people not to exercise their constitutional rights.
Fort said that now that she’s mayor, Bottoms must go further.
“Right now, Black people believe that the police in their community are tantamount to an occupying force that’s designed to keep Black people and working-class people under control,” he said.
Atlanta police didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Bottoms said Tuesday on NBC’s “TODAY” show that more administrative orders involving the police are likely coming.
“We have to objectively look at de-escalation. That’s not very clear in our policies,” Bottoms said. “Shooting at moving vehicles and so many other things — that as we’re peeling back the layers of our standard operating procedures. Some of it’s ambiguous, and some of it is simply not laid out.”
Given the history of Atlanta, a majority-Black city, and its storied place in America’s civil rights movement, the police department has benefited from a reformist-type legacy in the past, with Black officers joining the force and pushing back at Jim Crow restrictions themselves, said Nirej Sekhon, a Georgia State University law professor who studies policing.
But that “hasn’t translated to particularly radical renovation in recent times,” he said. “We have to be careful about celebrating Atlanta’s civil rights history, not because there’s nothing to celebrate or because it’s all a lie, but because it’s still incomplete.”
The legal action was necessary, the complaint says, in order “to prevent Defendant John R. Bolton, a former National Security Advisor, from compromising national security by publishing a book containing classified information—in clear breach of agreements he signed as a condition of his employment and as a condition of gaining access to highly classified information and in clear breach of the trust placed within him by the United States Government.”
Trump’s order would also incentivize local departments to bring on experts in mental health, addiction and homelessness as “co-responders” to “help officers manage these complex encounters.” Anditwould encourage better information sharing to track officers with “credible abuses” to prevent them from moving from one department to the next.
The text of the order directs the Justice Department to create and maintain a database to track when officers have been terminated or decertified, have been criminally convicted for on-duty conduct or faced civil judgments for improper use of force. It notes that information-sharing related to use-of-force complaints would not apply in “instances where a law enforcement officer resigns or retires while under active investigation related to the use of force,” and emphasizes that the database would track onlyepisodes in which an officer was “afforded fair process.“
But it does not address the issue of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that reform advocates say shields police from liability and that the White House has called a nonstarter for any reform measures.
The president’s action on Tuesday swiftly drew criticism from activists for systemic reform for not going far enough and for a lack of teeth. The vast majority of law enforcement decisions are made at the state and local levels, and Trump‘sorder aims only to incentivize local departments by stipulating that only departments that adopt his reforms might be eligible for discretionary grants from the Justice Department.
The ACLU seized on the optics of Tuesday‘s event, as well as Trump‘s failure to mention racism in his remarks or in the executive order. It noted that on the point of whether racism exists in policing, he even broke with some in his party. The group also called for communities to divest from police departments and shrink police presence in Americans’ lives.
“The word he was afraid to use is more memorable than anything he did say,” the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero, said in a statement. “The president’s use of victims’ families as a backdrop as he offered empty words of sympathy, anemic reforms, and hollow rhetoric was sad — to borrow a word from the president’s vocabulary. What’s wrong with this picture: The president had a veritable beauty pageant of law enforcement officers behind him as he signed an executive order that was supposedly meant as a response to the public outcry of recent weeks.“
The Brennan Center, a think tank and advocacy group that has pushed for criminal justice reform, dismissed the executive order as making “only cosmetic changes when the nation is ready for law enforcement’s racism to be pulled out by its roots,” noting that it “says nothing“ about racial disparities in policing. While the group called the order‘s reforms a slate of “welcome changes,” it said that legislation in the House was more comprehensive and would be more effective.
The president himself appeared to acknowledge the restraints of unilateral action, announcing that “beyond the steps we’re taking today, I am committed to working with Congress on additional measures” for police reform.
The executive order comes as Senate Republicans led by Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lone black member of their conference, are planning to introduce their own police reform proposal on Wednesday. Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced their own sweeping police reform proposal, which would ban chokeholds, limit qualified immunity for police officers, create a National Police Misconduct Registry and stop the use of no-knock arrest warrants in drug cases.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the executive order “was pretty good as far as it went,” but noted that “there are limitations.“
“It’s not the law,” he said. “But I thought it was fine.”
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) added that he supported the president‘s recommending a ban on chokeholds, and predicted that GOP legislation “is going to be consistent with that.”
But Trump’s executive order was panned by Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“While the president has finally acknowledged the need for police reform, one modest, inadequate executive order will not make up for his decades of inflammatory rhetoric and his recent policies designed to roll back the progress that we’ve made in previous years,” Schumer told reporters. “Now is the moment for real, lasting, comprehensive change.“
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), meanwhile, said the president‘s latest move “completely misses the mark,“ asserting that the American public wants to see “bold ideas that will lead to major change.“
House Speaker Pelosi, in an interview on MSNBC, also ripped Trump’s order as “weak“ and pointed to the president’s call on Congress to supplement Tuesday‘s executive order.
“He alluded to that a number of times: Congress should do more. Yes, it would be easy to do more, because he fell so short,“ she said, before blasting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for dismissing the House bill.
The House is expected to approve its bill at the committee level later this week and bring the measure to the floor late next week. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are now considering holding a vote on Scott’s police reform bill before the July Fourth recess — after previouslyruling out the idea — with a decision on timing likely coming this week.
At the outset of his remarks, the president took on a more somber tone as he addressed his private meeting with the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Botham Jean, Antwon Rose, Atatiana Jefferson, Jemel Roberson, Michael Dean, Darius Tarver, Cameron Lamb and Everett Palmer.
Fox News chief legal correspondent Shannon Bream breaks down the ruling on ‘America’s Newsroom.’
“Fox News @ Night” anchor and Fox News chief legal correspondent Shannon Bream joined the “Fox News Rundown” podcast Tuesday to discuss the Supreme Court‘s ruling that employers who fire workers for being gay or transgender violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“For every employer, just about, in this country, [for] those who are covered by Title VII, which is most of them, this is going to be a big change and we have to think about the ripple effects,” Bream told host Jessica Rosenthal.
The Civil Rights Act bars employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, sex, color, religion or national origin.
“What the court had looked at is whether or not that generic term ‘sex’ — say you hire only men and you won’t hire any female employees. That seems like a pretty clear cut case for people,” Bream explained. “So what we’re asking in 2020 now is the question of whether that word ‘sex’ means LGBTQ employees, whether it specifically extends [to] if you take adverse employment discrimination against someone because they are transitioning, [or] because they are gay.
“In a 6-3 decision authored by one of the newer justices, Neil Gorsuch, he said, ‘Yes, Title VII does apply to those situations.”
Gorsuch was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and the four members of the court’s so-called “liberal wing”: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.
“Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations,” Gorsuch wrote. “In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee.”
“It’s interesting, in his [opinion], he [Gorsuch] said, ‘I’m not getting into locker rooms or, you know, any of these restroom facilities,'” Bream said. “‘I’m not getting into any of that stuff. We’re not going there. This decision doesn’t apply to those kinds of things … Those are separate cases that may come before us at some point, but we’re not going there.'”
Bream added that other potential cases that could stem from Monday’s decision involve whether “places of worship now be forced to hire employees that don’t live by the tenets of their faith.”
“A good example are often Catholic schools,” she said. “If they hire teachers and the teachers say, ‘I will live by the tenets of the Catholic faith,’ and then either they’re living with a partner outside of marriage or they have a same-sex wedding and marriage, then the school can come back and say, ‘Well, listen, you’re teaching the kids, you had agreed to abide by the church’s teachings and we can’t keep you working here in this position as a teacher.’ I think those are the kinds of cases that will now come up in that context. And Justice Gorsuch said, ‘We’re not addressing any of that.'”
After eight days of continuing clashes with protesters, staff at the East Precinct police headquarters in Seattle suddenly vacated the building on Monday, June 8, shredding documents and leaving it empty.
Among protesters, there was initial confusion over why police would outright leave, but organizers suspected a trap.
“The SPD seem like what they wanted to do is abandon the East Precinct and then wait on the borders, just like a few blocks away, for somebody to try to set a fire to repeat what was going on in Minneapolis,” Carla, a protester who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, told Vox. “Then they can rush in and say, ‘Now our use of military force against unarmed civilians is justified.’”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, protesters set about creating a peaceful — and safe — police-free neighborhood. And the officerslargelyhaven’t bothered to come back.
People paint an acronym for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” on June 10. After Seattle police abandoned the East Precinct headquarters, residents turned the area into a safe and police-free neighborhood.David Ryder/Getty Images
People draw messages with chalk in an intersection that saw clashes between police and protesters just days before in the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” also known as the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest,” on June 10.David Ryder/Getty Images
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ as it was referred to early on, started as a meme, said Carla. “I was there the morning after the East Precinct was abandoned, and CHAZ was sort of just a joke that people were sharing, like, ‘Oh, this is an autonomous zone,’” she told Vox, referring to an area that is free from the local government structure and control.
But the idea soon took off among the protesters. City personnel showed up the day after the precinct was abandoned to remove the barricades that police had set up to control the protests, but protesters convinced the workers to let them set up roadblocks to keep city traffic out of the area. They ended up sequestering an approximately six-block area in the central Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill.
“This is the urban core of the city,” Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, whose district encompasses the protest area, told Vox. “It’s dense and it has a long history, including of LGBTQ rights activism in the ’80s.”
CHAZ has since evolved further into a center of peaceful protest, free political speech, co-ops, and community gardens. Protesters have invited the city’s houseless population, who had been subject to a mass “clearing” of tent communities throughout the city, to come stay in the neighborhood. Movie nights have been held, including Mississippi Burning, about two FBI agents investigating lynchings of black people and activists in Mississippi during the civil rights era.
“There was an impromptu dodgeball game,” said Carla. “There are people smoking weed in circles … and just having normal conversations, and then 20 feet away, you have this large group of people standing around somebody with a megaphone talking about Marxism.”
The zone, where hundreds of people can be found on any given day, is largely leaderless, with decisions often being made by vote. But volunteers have stepped in anyway, doing everything from distributing food to cleaning up garbage in the area. The vibe there is pretty relaxed, said Carla.
“It’s really hard to pin this place down,” she said. “This is a place that is built and maintained by marginalized people, and they’re the voices that are driving this.”
Yet right-wing media has painted CHAZ as some kind of war zone, portraying the tiny neighborhood as if it were forcibly seceding from the US. While protest organizers in the area are understandably reticent to speak with reporters — several protest leaders did not respond to interview requests from Vox — there is no hint of the violence suggested by the likes of Fox News.
There are also goals to the protests. Organizers put out an extensive list of demands in a Medium post on June 9, broken into four categories: the justice system, health and human services, economics, and education. They include defunding and abolishing the SPD, an end to the school-to-prison pipeline, and the de-gentrification of Seattle, among many other demands.
Nine days into the zone’s creation, its name has also evolved, as it’s now known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP. But regardless of what it’s called, the run of events that brought the zone into existence was an extraordinary demonstration of protester organizing — and police incompetence.
The protests that gave birth to CHOP
Sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, mass protests have broken out all over the country over the past several weeks, and Seattle saw some of the most intense demonstrations.
“There’ve been multiple protests throughout the city on a daily basis,” Sawant told Vox. “One of the key sort of battlegrounds happened to develop at the 11th and Pine intersection on Capitol Hill.”
According to Sawant, who was at the Capitol Hill protest the evening of June 7, which saw the most intense police crackdown of the week, it was police who first turned violent against otherwise peaceful protesters in the area. “One moment I was having political conversations with a group of young people about how do we fight police violence and racism and how that connects to capitalism itself,” she said. “And the next moment, I felt mace in my eyes. And then a few moments later, there was tear gas and flash-bang grenades going off. Somebody counted hundreds of them the next morning.”
“We Can’t Breathe” is projected on a wall near the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct on June 9.David Ryder/Getty Images
The violence of police crackdowns on otherwise peaceful protesters sent shock waves throughout the liberal city. During the preceding week, calls for Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to step down began to grow louder.
“That violence lies at the doorstep of Democratic establishment and Mayor Durkan,” said Sawant. “There started to be calls for Durkan to resign because people were correctly horrified at this violence. People were just stunned that this is Seattle in 2020.”
The day after the protest, police vacated the precinct building, and even now, more than a week later, no one knows who ordered it. Neither Durkan nor Police Chief Carmen Best has taken responsibility. “We were asked to do an operational plan in case we needed to leave,” Best said at a press conference Thursday. “The decision was made. We’re still evaluating about how that change came about but it didn’t come from me.”
However, Best disputed the characterization that it was abandoned in the first place. “We did not abandon the precinct, but we had to remove personnel for a short period of time,” Best told Good Morning America on Friday.
While police haven’t yet moved directly against protesters, officers have been seen in and around the precinct building over the past several days, according to social media reports.
Right-wing panic over the protest zone
Initial media reports about the zone, especially at Fox News and throughout the conservative mediasphere, portrayed the autonomous zone as a kind of anarchist threat to society. One notorious Fox News live hit included a graphic indicating that the network was reporting from the US-CHAZ border, as if the zone were no longer part of the United States.
Further, several right-leaning media outlets reported that local business owners had been approached by armed anarchists who demanded mob-like protection payments. That has since been debunked by business owners who explained that it was false and that the local businesses were racking up much-needed sales after being hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
Then, on June 12, Fox News was busted by the Seattle Times for photoshopping an image of a gunman with a green mask into images of protesters in the area.
But the initial reports were enough to catch the attention of President Donald Trump. On June 11, Trump tweeted at Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Durkan to “take back” the city by force before he was compelled to intervene.
People on the ground inside the protest zone have been encouraging one another not to believe media reports or rumors over what’s happening in the zone unless they see it themselves.
“It’s a game of telephone,” Carla said. “I’ve gotten into the habit of just saying if you don’t know the person that you’re talking to, and if you don’t have the full context of a video clip or an audio clip, then just assume that it’s deliberate misinformation. Ask yourself who stands to gain from that kind of misinformation.”
Life inside the CHOP
One of the reasons for all the conservative media hoopla is that autonomous zones like this don’t happen all that frequently. Like CHOP, Camp Maroon in Philadelphia is a recently created autonomous zone of houseless people with their own list of demands for city and state officials.
Even with the inaccurate reporting, that isn’t to say there isn’t some discord at CHOP. According to Carla, the name change and subsequent confusion came from an internal struggle between two groups of protesters with differing visions for the area. For days, Carla said, there has been a power struggle between organizers who envisioned the zone as a peaceful, organized protest against police violence, and another group who wanted to see CHOP become more of an anarchist space where marginalized people could obtain mutual aid when needed.
While the protest does have some loose leadership, there are few formal structures. Sawant compares the space to the “Night of 500 tents” during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Seattle in October 2011, of which she was a part. Back then, Occupy protesters were able to drive police from their space before police returned and cleared out the area where the protests took place.
Already, said Sawant, CHOP has outlasted what they were able to achieve with that Occupy action, which only lasted three days. But she said she expects police to clear the area sometime in the near future. “I don’t think that we can in any way assume that the police will not come back and specifically attack this space,” she said. “I think we should expect that that could happen at any moment, because that’s exactly what happened in Occupy.”
In the meantime, protesters have managed to create a police-free space in which black people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, and houseless people feel especially safe. It’s even become somewhat of a tourist attraction for more affluent white, liberal families.
“Talking with my friends and talking with a couple of people on the ground, I keep hearing people say, ‘I never felt this safe walking in the city,’” said Carla, noting that the anti-homeless architecture and corporate feel of the neighborhood has largely given over to graffiti and friendly faces. “The knowledge that the police aren’t there [has created] this feeling that this is a space that belongs to everybody.”
The absence of police in the area near the East Precinct has created a sense that the neighborhood “belongs to everybody,” according to one Seattle protester.Noah Riffe/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Sawant has a more complex explanation. “We have an interest in having safe neighborhoods, but what makes neighborhoods unsafe is not the absence of police,” she said. “What makes neighborhoods [and] neighbors unsafe, and what generates the conditions for crime, predominantly is economic inequality and injustice.”
For her part, Sawant is introducing several measures at the city council level to address the demands of protesters, including turning the East Precinct building into a community center, cutting the city’s police budget, and permanently banning the use of less lethal force against protesters by police.
Both Carla and Sawant hope the space persists into the future as a place for protesting and political organizing. But Sawant also notes what an achievement it’s been to show the world that these protests don’t need harsh crackdowns in the first place.
“Only days ago, that same space on Capitol Hill was a war-like scenario with the police inflicting 100 percent of violence and brutality against peaceful protesters,” said Sawant. “Since the young people were able to win this political battleground victory, they have been able to demonstrate [they can create a space] which is welcoming, peaceful, and multiracial.”
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Police have released a recording of the 911 call by a Wendy’s employee in Atlanta before the death of Rayshard Brooks, who was shot and killed by police.
Brooks, 27, was reportedly asleep in the Wendy’s drive-thru before police arrived.
“I tried to wake him up, but he’s parked dead in the middle of the drive-thru, so I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” the caller in the 911 recording says. “He woke up, looked at me and I was like, ‘You got to move out of the drive-thru.’ Because people can’t — they’re going around him,” the employee said, NBC reported.
Video released from the scene shows Brooks in a physical altercation with two officers before fleeing from them. Officials say Brooks took a stun gun from one of the officers and pointed it at an officer before he was shot.
The Atlanta chief of police has since resigned, and Brooks’s killing was ruled a homicide. The officer who shot Brooks, Garrett Rolfe, has been fired. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) is leading the investigation of the case for Brooks.
At a news conference on Saturday, GBI Director Vic Reynolds said Brooks struggled with the officers as they attempted to arrest him following a failed field sobriety test.
“During the course of that confrontation, Mr. Brooks was able to secure, from one of the Atlanta officers, his Taser,” Reynolds said.
Body camera footage from the incident shows the officers deliberating with Brooks for over 25 minutes before the arrest was initiated.
At one point, Brooks struggles to remember how many drinks he had that evening and asks the officers if he can walk home.
“Of extreme concern in the murder of Rayshard Brooks is the fact that he was shot in the back multiple times while fleeing,” Stewart and law partner Justin Miller said in a statement Saturday, NBC reported.
He added that C.D.C. employees would be redeployed to states experiencing new outbreaks and encouraged governors to think “on a county level” when dealing with them. The vice president also said that the virus’s spread was now well contained, and he adopted a term that Mr. Trump has used for the virus — “embers,” which can be quickly snuffed out.
“The president often talks about embers,” Mr. Pence added. “As we go through the summer, as we see, over all, as you all know, around the country, that despite a mass increase in testing, we are still averaging roughly 20,000 cases a day, which is significantly down from six weeks ago.”
Experts, including some in the Trump administration, have warned that stamping out the coronavirus is not that simple. In fact, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, warned last week that “we have something that turned out to be my worst nightmare,” a reference to the virus’s ability to spread rapidly.
On the call, Mr. Pence instructed Alex M. Azar II, the health secretary, to address the problem in a “constructive” way. Mr. Azar said that localized outbreaks at meatpacking plants and nursing homes would continue to be a focus for officials. “If any of them light on fire,” Mr. Azar said, “we’ve got to get there right away.”
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, who is coordinating the administration’s response, reiterated that hospitalization rates for the virus had been declining across the country, though some states had seen an uptick.
“You’re finding cases in the community rather than finding them in the clinic and the hospital,” she said, adding that more people had been identified as asymptomatic or presymptomatic in recent weeks.
She said protest sites across the country had not yet seen a rise in coronavirus cases, though she said data had begun to show “early upticks” in Minneapolis.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order directing police departments to adopt new standards for the use of force following protests over the deaths of George Floyd and other African Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers.
The order also calls for the creation of a national database to allow departments to track potential hires with records of abuse.
Trump’s event underscored the difficulty he often faces reconciling different viewpoints on a cultural issue that deeply divides the nation. He was flanked by police officials in the Rose Garden but had met beforehand privately with the families of victims, who did not attend the executive order signing. He praised the families and promised justice, but quickly shifted into pro-law enforcement talking points that are a trademark of his campaign rallies.
“To all of the hurting families, I want you to know that all Americans mourn by your side,” Trump said. “Your loved ones will not have died in vain.”
He called the families “incredible” and vowed to pursue justice for them and went on to describe police as “brave,” “selfless” and “courageous.”
Trump said the order would focus on certifying police officers on de-escalation tactics; creating a database to track officers who have been accused of using excessive force, ; and launching a co-respondent program that would see mental health professional working more closely with police.
Trump said the order would prioritize Department of Justice federal grants to police departments that seek out independent credentialing and adopt use-of-force standards, but did not mandate that all departments adopt them.
The order does not include a ban on chokeholds as many activists have demanded but says they should only be used in life or death situation.
“Americans want law and order, they demand law and order,” Trump said. “We need to bring law enforcement and communities closer together, not to drive them apart.”
But Trump spent less time attempting to bridge the gap between those who see systemic racism in some police forces and those who feel the deadly confrontations are the work of a few bad cops.
He argued that “reducing crime and raising standards are not opposite goals,” but did not explain in depth how to find common ground.
The orderwas crafted in consultation with law enforcement officials and representatives of families of victims of police killings, officials said. It remains unclear how it will be enforced or how law enforcement agencies will be held accountable, but officials pointed to local leaders and mayors who they said would be responsible for their police departments.
While the order is aimed at reforming police training and boosting funding for mental health, it does not address issues of systemic racism that activists say are crucial to meaningful criminal justice reform.
The White House has pushed back on some activists’ calls for reallocating police funding to other community programs, while Trump has fiercely defended members of the law enforcement community and described police brutality as the work of a few “bad apples.”
“The vast majority of police officers are selfless and courageous public servants,” Trump said, adding that they face “great danger.”
He praised officers for putting their “lives at stake to protect someone who they don’t know or never even met” and threatened “grave penalties” for anyone responsible for looting and arson amid ongoing protests.
And he repeatedly framed the debate in partisan terms. He noted President Barack Obama had not solved the issue, and vowed to do better than his predecessor. He also held up a push by some on the left to “defund” police departments in the wake of Floyd’s death, an effort he described as “radical and dangerous.”
“Americans know the truth: Without police there is chaos,” he said. “Without law, there is anarchy.”
The president also called on Congress to push through legislation that would allocate funding to incorporate the White House’s programs.
The order also comes as congressional Democrats and Republicans are working to pass their own versions of police reform. House Democrats unveiled a bill last week that would ban certain police tactics such as chokeholds, mandate body cameras and curb “qualified immunity,” which shields police officers from civil lawsuits if accused of misconduct. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who is leading the Republican effort and is expected to unveil legislation in the GOP-led Senate on Wednesday, has said ending qualified immunity was a “non-starter.”
The chambers will have to find a middle ground and garner the approval of Trump before any changes become law.
Floyd died on Memorial Day after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The incident was captured on camera and sparked national outcry over police brutality and racial injustice. Protests erupted across the country and around the world, and have led to a groundswell of support to pressure lawmakers to address police reform in recent weeks.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) said Monday that it will get rid of its anti-crime units and transfer plainclothes officers to other parts of the department.
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said during a press conference that the department will immediately reassign about 600 anti-crime officers to areas such as the detective bureau and neighborhood policing.
Shea called the overhaul “in the realm of closing one of the last chapters of stop-question-and-frisk.”
“Make no mistake, this is a seismic shift in the culture of how the NYPD polices this great city,” he said. “It will be felt immediately throughout the five district attorney’s offices. It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.”
Police will still have plainclothes officers in other units, including surveillance, narcotics and transit teams, he said.
Shea emphasized that the decision was “no reflection” on the NYPD officers and insisted the recent protests in the city over the killing of George Floyd did not prompt the change, adding that discussions about the change had occurred for about a year.
“What we always struggle with, I believe, as police executives, is not keeping crime down — it’s keeping crime down and keeping the community working with us,” he said.
“This is not without risk,” Shea acknowledged. “And the risk will fall squarely on my shoulders.”
The Legal Aid Society, which serves low-income families and individuals, praised the decision.
“There is no better place to start reducing the NYPD’s headcount than by disbanding the Anti-Crime Unit, an outfit infamous for employing hyper-aggressive policing techniques to brutalize New Yorkers,” a statement from the group read.
“This is welcome news, but New Yorkers will not be better served if these officers are simply reassigned, carrying with them the same bad habits that earned Anti-Crime its dismal reputation. The City must drastically reduce the NYPD’s headcount and use those funds to invest in communities. Anything less is simply window dressing to distract away from the greater systemic issues that currently roil law enforcement in New York.”
New York City Council leaders last week backed a plan to reduce the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion as cities across the country explore their relationships with police departments.
Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody after a now-former officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said he couldn’t breathe and became unresponsive.
“I feel it is high time to surely break with the South Korean authorities,” said Kim Yo Jong, the increasingly influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to the BBC.
Authorities in Beijing have described the city’s coronavirus outbreak as “extremely severe” as dozens more cases emerged, travelfrom the city was curtailed and its schools and universities shut down.
Beijing residents were told to avoid “non-essential” travel out of the capital, and anyone entering or leaving will be tested for Covid-19.
Additional neighbourhoods were fenced off on Tuesday, with 27 now designated medium risk, which means authorities can impose stricter restrictions on the movement of people and cars and can carry out temperature checks. One has been designated high risk.
“The epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe,” Beijing city spokesman Xu Hejian warned at a press conference. “Right now we have to take strict measures to stop the spread of Covid-19.”
Entry restrictions have also been brought back in many residential compounds. Health authorities said sealed-off residences and people in quarantine would have food and medicine delivered to them.
Schools, which had recently re-opened, have been ordered to resume online classes, and universities required to suspend the return of their students.
Companies were told to encourage working from home, indoor sports and entertain venues have been shut, and libraries, museums, art galleries and parks must now limit capacity.
Authorities also reported four new domestic infections in neighbouring Hebei province, while a case reported in Sichuan province was linked to the Beijing cluster. Some other cities across China warned they would quarantine arrivals from the capital.
The outbreak is the most significant in China since February, prompting fears of a second wave and questions over how the virus was able to spread given severe quarantine measures taken by authorities. The outbreak is potentially embarrassing for Beijing, which had declared victory over the virus and ordered citizens back to work.
The capital, where measures were among the strictest in the country, had reported no new locally transmitted cases for 56 consecutive days before a cluster of diagnoses began on Thursday. Before that most new cases had come from Chinese nationals returning from abroad.
On Tuesday, state media appeared to push the idea that the virus had come from abroad. Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said the strain was most similar to those seen in Europe, the US or Russia.
“It clearly indicates the virus strain is different from what it was two months ago,” he told state broadcaster CGTN. “The virus strain is the major epidemic strain in European countries. So it is from outside China brought to Beijing.”
In a similar vein, a deputy director at the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told state media he believed the new outbreak involved a more contagious strain of the virus than the one that hit Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic.
Scientists in Europe said it was too early to tell whether the virus causing the new Beijing outbreak was different in terms of transmissibility from the original.
“Genetic sequencing could easily establish if it was actually imported from Europe. But with the limited information currently available, “the most that can be interpreted – if indeed it does look like being from Europe – is that it is good evidence of control of the original Chinese spread, and no resurgence of that virus,” said Deenan Pillay, professor of virology at University College London.
The outbreak – linked to 106 cases, including 27 reported on Tuesday – has been traced to the Xinfadi wholesale food market in south-west Beijing’s Fengtai district, which sells thousands of tonnes of food a day and which had been visited by more than 200,000 people since 30 May.
Samples of the virus were discovered on chopping boards used for imported salmon at the market, fuelling speculation it had come from abroad even though experts have said fish is unlikely to carry the disease and any link to salmon may have been the result of cross-contamination.
The World Health Organization’s emergencies director, Mike Ryan, said he expected Chinese authorities to publish the genetic sequencing of the virus in Beijing and supported their efforts so far. He said the idea that new outbreak was caused by imported salmon was not the “primary hypothesis”.
“A cluster like this is a concern and it needs to be investigated and controlled – and that is exactly what the Chinese authorities are doing,” he said.
On Tuesday, Zhao Lijian, spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said Beijing had asked Canada to investigate parasites found in shipments of the fish. Norwegian exporters have said China has halted salmon imports.
After months of economic paralysis, authorities have tried to limit lockdown measures to parts of the city and encouraged residents to continue “life as normal,” while taking extra precautions.
Provinces as far away as Yunnan in the south have brought in rules requiring quarantine for people returning from Beijing. Shanghai authorities announced that all arrivals from medium– and high-risk areas have to undergo 14 days of quarantine. Some long-distance bus routes connecting Beijing and other provinces were suspended.
All indoor sport and entertainment venues in the city were closed on Monday. Coaches and players from the Beijing Super League football team, Guoan, have been tested and given a week off because their training camp was in the same district as the outbreak source, local media reported. In Xicheng district, which borders Fengtai, another market was shut after a coronavirus case was confirmed. Seven neighbourhoods near the market have been closed off.
More than 8,000 workers from the market have now been tested and sent to centralised quarantine facilities, and other Beijing wet markets, basement markets and more than 30,000 restaurants are being disinfected.
Health authorities have entered what state media termed “wartime mode” in response.
More than 76,000 nearby residents were tested on Sunday across almost 300 testing points, authorities said, and strict measures have been put in place, including school closures, and transport suspensions, including ride-sharing and taxi services.
Since the first case of the virus was detected last year in the city of Wuhan, China has reported more than 84,000 cases and more than 4,600 people have died.
Chinese officials and state media have been quick to defend the country amid fears of a possible second wave.
“Control measures have been in place in communities, three officials accountable were dismissed,” said the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, Hu Xijin. “US politicians will likely see a miracle that Beijing can have zero new cases in a month.”
Three people have been dismissed over the outbreak, including the head of the Xinfadi market, the local Communist party chief, and the deputy head of the district.
Additional reporting by Lillian Yang, Sarah Boseley and agencies
Second Lieutenant Robert Norwood joins ‘Fox & Friends’ after the ceremony.
Members of the mainstream media sounded the alarm about President Trump‘s health for what they believe were signs of declining health during his appearance at the West Point commencement ceremony.
Following his prepared remarks to the military academy graduates, Trump was seen cautiously walking down a ramp from the stage.
A clip was shared on Twitter by Vox journalist Aaron Rapar and has over 12 million views.
The New York Times ran the headline, “Trump’s Halting Walk Down Ramp Raises New Health Questions.”
“Mr. Trump — who turned 74 on Sunday, the oldest a U.S. president has been in his first term — was recorded hesitantly descending the ramp one step at a time after he delivered an address to graduating cadets at the New York-based academy on Saturday. The academy’s superintendent, Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, walked alongside him. Mr. Trump sped up slightly for the final three steps, as he got to the bottom,” Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote.
Many took to Twitter and questioned the president’s health.
“Serious question: what is going on with him? His supporters have tried so hard to get the media to question Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness but they so often engage in projection it seems worth inquiring,” MSNBC host Joy Reid tweeted.
“Your periodic reminder that we still do not know why @realDonaldTrump was suddenly taken by car to Walter Reed in November w/o notifying either hospital personnel or the local police who would normally restrict traffic to clear a path for a presidential motorcade to travel safely,” White House reporter Andrew Feinberg wrote.
Haberman and other journalists also speculated that Trump’s sip of water during his speech was also a cause for concern because he needed both hands to lift the glass to his mouth.
Trump responded to speculation about the viral ramp moment on Saturday night.
“The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery,” Trump tweeted. “The last thing I was going to do is ‘fall’ for the Fake News to have fun with. Final ten feet I ran down to level ground. Momentum!”
Trump’s tweet was apparently fact-checked by Haberman, who wrote “There was no evidence that the ramp was slippery, and the skies were clear during the ceremony.”
On Monday, CNN anchor John King said Trump looked “a little shaky” on the ramp. CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip pandered whether Trump was being “transparent” about his health based on the “latest incidents.”
“Repeated history of lack of transparency leads to questions of skepticism,” King responded.
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck called the speculation about Trump’s health “unfounded conspiracy theories.”
“It was only a few years ago that they openly wondered about his ‘mental fitness’ and specifically whether he had dementia. They had no evidence at the time and they didn’t this past weekend either besides their personal desires of wanting it to be true,” Houck told Fox News. “All told, this weekend marked another case of the press wanting to have it both ways by playing amateur doctor and psychologist with the President while also denouncing any and all health questions about liberals.”
The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech similarly called the coverage “conspiratorial nonsense.”
“Any man who has ever worn a suit that is too tight in the elbow has encountered this issue. Idiocy,” Domenech said about Trump’s sip of water.
Haberman, however, defended the coverage on Monday, saying Trump’s tweet responding to the speculation “invited” such reporting.
“We don’t know what the issue is. We don’t know just by looking at this video,” Haberman acknowledged on CNN. “It is perfectly legitimate for them to raise questions about Joe Biden’s health. He’s 77 years old. It’s also legitimate to talk about the president’s.”
Tom Elliott, founder and news editor of the media company Grabien, told Fox News that it’s “certainly fair” to question Trump’s health as he himself “makes these kinds of attacks a core part of his political warcraft,” but suggested that the media is hypocritical of “such thin gruel so triumphantly.”
“When Hillary literally collapsed on camera, the national news media tsked-tsked conservatives for even circulating the video,” Elliott recalled about Secretary Clinton’s fall at the 9/11 Memorial during the 2016 election. “Trump carefully walking down a ramp is being portrayed as proof positive he’s mentally deranged.”
Elliott added, “Had they not shown their cards in 2016, their current coverage would have a lot more credibility.”
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