DOJ opens civil rights probe as prez takes heat for response
The Trump administrations’s response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., expanded from the president’s tweets to a Department of Justice civil rights probe, while his national security adviser branded the attack “terrorism.”
Trump meanwhile took heat from members of both parties for failing to denounce extremist violence personally and forcefully. A White House statement yesterday explicitly denounced the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, but Trump himself remained out of sight and silent, save for a retweet about two Virginia state policemen killed in a helicopter crash while monitoring the Charlottesville protests.
The White House statement yesterday read: “The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred and of course that includes white Supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups.”
The Richmond, Va., FBI Field Office, the Civil Rights Division, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia announced yesterday they have opened a civil rights investigation into the circumstances of the deadly crash that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was there to protest white national- ists who had gathered for a rally.
“The FBI will collect all available facts and evidence and will ensure that the investigation is conducted in a fair, thorough and impartial manner,” the office stated in a press release.
James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Ohio was arrested and charged with second-degree murder for the crash. He’d been photographed earlier carrying a shield emblazoned with the emblem of Vanguard America, one of the groups that participated in the rally. The group yesterday denied any association with Fields, saying the shields were “freely handed out to anyone in attendance.”
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told ABC’s “This Week” yesterday, “I certainly think anytime that you commit an attack against people to incite fear, it is terrorism. It meets the definition of terrorism. But what this is, what you see here, is you see someone who is a criminal, who is committing a criminal act against fellow Americans.”
Later on in the program, Anthony Scaramucci, briefly Trump’s communications director, said the president “needed to be much harsher as it related to the white supremacists and the nature of that. I applaud General McMaster for calling it out for what it is. It’s actually terrorism. Whether it’s domestic or international terrorism, with the moral authority of the presidency, you have to call that stuff out.”
Ryan Williams, a top aide on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said, “Trump missed the mark, and he missed his moment. His only hope now is to try to salvage his response to this in the best way he can, by striking the right tone. And that includes a denunciation of white supremacy from him. Not from nuanced White House statements, but his mouth.”
Charlottesville Mayor Michael Singer, a Democrat, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday that he hopes Trump “looks himself in the mirror and thinks very deeply about who he consorted with.”