politics

I didn't think this was particularly controversial

You might be surprised to read about this official government investigation that disagreed (bolding added throughout by me),

In MAGA world, it’s now accepted as fact that the media badly botched this story in a rush to make Trump look petty and abusive. Back in the, er, realer reality, it’s remains clear that the Trump administration ordered the park cleared so the president could stage his photo op.

That these two narratives have simply marched on, parallel to one another, doesn’t make them equally plausible, of course. The latter version has always been more consistent with witness descriptions, video footage, and even accounts from National Guard troops at the scene. But the MAGA version got a boost in June 2021, when a report from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of the Interior concluded: "the evidence does not support a finding that the USPP cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.”

It’s understandable that Trump and his supporters would champion the report as vindication. Inspectors general are, ideally, independent investigators, and some OIGs have produced damning reports about the agencies they oversee. But as I and others wrote at the time, there were far too many problems with the report to accept it as the definitive account.

The article then dives into those problems, and they're worth reading, but I'm going to skip down a bit to get to the point

This is all newly relevant for two reasons. First, the Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee recently published a new report on the 2020 police actions against the protesters. It lays out a meticulous, well-documented argument that the original narrative — that the park was cleared for Trump’s photo op — is the most likely explanation for what happened.

To be clear, this is a partisan report. It wasn’t endorsed by Republicans on the committee. Much of it rehashes what I and others wrote about the OIG report’s limitations and blind spots when it came out. But it also includes evidence previously unavailable to the public, including statements from interviews with other law enforcement officials at the scene. Among the most compelling pieces of new evidence is something assistant chief with the D.C. Metro Police Department (MPD) told OIG investigators. According to the assistant chief, when he told a Park Police commander that MPD couldn’t legally clear the park until after the city imposed curfew, the Park Police commander responded, “The attorney general is here. We gotta go now."

This statement casts more doubt OIG report, and raises the question of why this portion of the assistant chief’s interview with investigators was left out of it.

The second reason to revisit all this is a recent ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit throwing out a lawsuit brought by the protesters who were violently cleared from the park. The three judges on the panel went out of their way to say they were not ruling on whether the protesters’ rights had been violated — although their tone suggests they were.

Instead, the judges explain that they’re hamstrung by Supreme Court precedent, which has made it nearly impossible to sue federal law enforcement officials, even for egregious constitutional violations. The judges ruled that while federal officials are in theory still obligated to respect the Constitutional, there’s really no reliable way to hold them accountable when they don’t.

This makes it all the more important to get right what happened at Lafayette Park. If Trump’s critics are correct, his administration inflicted mass violence and reckless constitutional violations on peaceful protesters so he could indulge in some garish authoritarian cosplay. Afterward, he and his administration then brazenly lied about it all. It was one of the most cynical displays of state violence against protesters in the nation’s capitol since the government’s attacks on the Bonus March protesters in 1932. And of course Trump is now running for president again.