A member of the National Guard straight notified Attorney General William Barr that anti-racist protesters were peaceful as Barr launched a violent police action against them before President Donald Trump walked to a church to present with a Bible for a photo-op, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton(D-D.C.) said Monday.
The “eyewitness” account supplied to Norton from the officer who was on task that day opposes Barr’s persistence in a CBS News interview Sunday that the protesters ” were not peaceful,” and that their actions called for a police onslaught.
Protesters were charged, struck with batons and guards and rubber bullets, manhandled, and tear-gassed June 1 to give way for Trump to walk throughout the street from the White Home so he might hold up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
” The D.C. National Guard member spoke to Attorney General Barr, who supervised, and explained that the crowd was peaceful– however soldiers from federal firms, consisting of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, stayed,” stated a declaration Sunday from the delegate’s workplace
Norton protected the identity of the National Guard officer, whom she personally talked to, because he was not authorized to promote the Guard, she informed HuffPost on Monday. He had connected to her office to recount the occasions of that evening, she stated.
According to his account, protesters gathered outside the White House in Lafayette Park that evening were told three times to disperse but that the “crowd was too large for many to hear the warnings.”
The “abrupt usage of smoke and pepper balls” even prior to curfew as Trump spoke in the White Home Rose Garden about punishing anti-racist protesters, “ca