DOJ report criticizes former AG Bill Barr for ‘chaotic’ response to 2020 George Floyd D.C. protests
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department’s top watchdog issued a report Wednesday criticizing former Attorney General Bill Barr’s management of the aggressive law enforcement response to protests in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2020 that turned violent in the wake the murder of George Floyd.
While DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz determined Barr was not personally involved in the controversial clearing of Lafayette Park to make way for former President Trump’s photo op in front of St. John’s Church on June 20, 2020, the 168-page report levels numerous criticisms regarding the “chaotic and disorganized” response by Barr and other DOJ leaders to the civil unrest that shook the nation’s capital.
“We were troubled by the Department leadership’s decision-making that required DOJ law enforcement agents and elite tactical units to perform missions for which they lacked the proper equipment and training,” the report says. “Multiple witnesses also told us that leadership did not timely and effectively communicate these deployment decisions to subordinates and non-DOJ agencies involved in the response.”
The report specifically singles out Barr’s efforts to show the DOJ could reign in the violence and vandalism surrounding the protests without military intervention, saying he “pressed DOJ law enforcement components to deploy personnel without sufficient attention to whether those personnel were properly trained or equipped for their mission.”
For example, the report confirms that Bureau of Prisons personnel deployed to respond to the unrest lacked jackets that had insignia identifying them as law enforcement personnel, which gained significant press attention and garnered harsh criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups. However, the review confirmed “that the lack of such markings was due to the fact that the BOP does not traditionally deploy personnel in a public-facing role outside the prison setting,” and not due to a deliberate effort to conceal the officers’ identities.
The review also scrutinizes the FBI’s deployment of personnel during the period between June 1 and June 3, following violent protests near the White House and a fire at St. John’s Church that led to former President Trump temporarily sheltering in the White House’s bunker on May 29.
According to the report, the deployment “lacked adequate planning, failed to provide sufficient guidance to personnel regarding their mission and legal authorities, and, by sending armed agents to respond to civil unrest for which they lacked the proper training or equipment, created safety and security risks for the agents and the public.”
“While we recognize that the civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder was a highly unusual situation that presented significant challenges the Department does not typically face, ensuring the safety of its personnel and the public should remain its utmost priority,” the report further said. “In the midst of a crisis, during pressure-filled moments when leadership must make hard decisions with little time to fully assess collateral and unintended consequences, the time-tested law enforcement practices and procedures that were collectively developed, after careful and calm deliberation, can and should be the first and most trusted resource for Department leadership.”
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump has begun to shut down the possibility of a second match against Vice President Kamala Harris after debating her Tuesday night, claiming he doesn’t need to debate her again because he won the debate.
“Well she wants a second debate because she lost tonight, very badly,” Trump told ABC News late Tuesday night during a surprise appearance in the spin room after participating in the presidential debate hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia.
“So, we’ll, you know, think about that. But she immediately called for a second,” Trump said, refusing to commit whether he’d participate.
Less than an hour after the ABC News presidential debate ended Tuesday night, Harris’ campaign called for another matchup. The campaign put out an email touting her performance at the debate and blasting Trump for his responses and demeanor.
Pressed by ABC News why Trump wouldn’t commit if she lost the debate, Trump said he’s looking at polls, boasting about what he believed is a lead over Harris in polling numbers. Harris leads Trump, 47% to 44%, according 538’s polling average.
Trump’s non-commitment to a second debate comes after the former president in May said he accepted what was going to be a fourth presidential debate with NBC News between Trump and then-candidate President Joe Biden — after debates with CNN, ABC News and Fox News.
In August, after Harris took over the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump again agreed to participate in a debate hosted by NBC, after ABC News and Fox News’ debates. Trump ended up doing a town hall with Fox News last week after Harris declined to participate.
But since the ABC News debate, Trump has been gradually escalating the rhetoric that he doesn’t need a second match with Harris, telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, “I sort of think maybe I shouldn’t do it.”
“I have to think about it, but if you won the debate, I sort of think maybe I shouldn’t do it. Why should I do another debate?” Trump said on “Hannity.”
During his visit to the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Wednesday afternoon to honor the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Trump said he was thinking about the possibility of a second debate.
“We’re looking at it, but, you know, when you win, you don’t really necessarily have to do it a second time. So we’ll see, but we had a, I thought we had a great debate last night,” Trump said. “I just don’t know. We’ll think about it.”
On Wednesday morning, Trump called into “Fox and Friends” and said he’d be “less inclined to” do a second debate with Harris. Still, he kept his options open without shutting down the possibility of a second debate completely: “Let’s see what happens.”
And on Wednesday afternoon, Trump posted on his social media site, “In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!'”
“Well, it’s no different with a Debate,” he continued. “She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?”
538 has collected three national polls and one swing-state poll that were conducted since the debate. In all of them, more people who watched the debate said Harris won the debate than said Trump did. On average, 57% of debate watchers nationally said Harris turned in the better performance; only 34% said Trump did.
Showing up in the spin room after the debate, Trump claimed Tuesday night was his “best debate ever,” suggesting his spin room visit had nothing to do with needing to clean up his debate performance.
“We thought it was our best debate ever. It was my best debate ever,” Trump said to a large group of reporters that surrounded him in the spin room.
“It showed how weak they are, how pathetic they are, and what they’re doing to destroy our country, on the border, with foreign trade, with everything. And, I think it was the best debate I’ve ever personally — that I’ve had,” Trump continued.
But after the debate, Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair who served as the former president’s surrogate in the spin room, said he had a “fine night,” adding she wished there were more debates.
“I think he had a night that we expected to see, which is that Donald Trump was four years in the White House. We all remember how our lives were then,” Lara Trump said when asked about Trump’s performance.
Pressed by reporters if she means her father-in-law didn’t have a great night, Lara Trump said, “I mean, he had a fine night,” and then added: “He had a night that was absolutely necessary, and I am so happy we finally got to see these two people on the stage.”
“I wish we had two more debates. We usually have three presidential debates. Kamala Harris has said — she only wants one, so far,” Lara Trump said just minutes before the Harris campaign called for a second debate. “Donald Trump would certainly be willing to do another debate.”
Some Democrats on Capitol Hill said Wednesday weighed in on the prospect of another Harris-Trump debate.
Sen. Tim Kaine said he supports another presidential debate between Harris and Trump, but said he didn’t think the former president would agree.
“I’m sort of not expecting that President Trump will accept a second debate, but [Harris] is very willing to do it and that’s good,” Kaine said.
Asked if another debate is needed, Sen. Cory Booker said “I don’t know about the word ‘needs.'”
“I mean this one debate was so revelatory, it so exposed Donald Trump,” Booker said. “I think it was a reminder for a lot of people just how unhinged and unchecked this guy is; how he can’t control himself.”
ABC News’ Allison Pecorin contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe and FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate faced a grilling from lawmakers about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month.
The two officials testified before a Senate panel on Tuesday about security arrangements at the site and the status of ongoing investigations into what occurred both on July 13 and in the days leading up to the shooting.
New details have emerged about the shooting, including a potential social media account owned by the shooter and questions about when the Secret Service first saw the gunman on the roof. Officials have also confirmed, after the FBI director’s ambiguous comments last week raised questions about what struck Trump, that the former president was hit by a bullet.
Rowe told lawmakers he was “ashamed” of the protection failures that day and said he visited the site of the shooting as one of his first acts as acting director.
“I went to the roof of the AGR building where the assailant fired shots and laid in a prone position to evaluate his line of sight. What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe said in his opening statement. “As a career law enforcement officer, and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”
Here are some key moments from the hearing.
Questions over timeline emerge
Rowe, who took over as the head of the Secret Service after former director Kim Cheatle’s resignation earlier this month, testified that Trump’s security detail didn’t have “any knowledge” there was an attacker on the roof with a gun prior to shots ringing out.
“It is my understanding those personnel were not aware that the assailant had a firearm until they heard gunshots,” he said. “Prior to that, they were operating with the knowledge that local law enforcement was working on issue of a suspicious individual prior to the shots being fired.”
In dramatic fashion, he also displayed pictures of where the local sniper team was supposed to be posted and showed images of his agents re-enacting the shooter’s position.
Rowe also said if they had “more information” about the 30 seconds between finding out the shooter had a gun on the roof and him opening fire, they would’ve been able to address it “more quickly.”
“It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that state local channel,” Rowe said.
Rowe said that while it was great there was a texting chain, more needs to go “over the net,” meaning, there needs to be more radio communication, which apparently there was a lack of during July 13.
Rowe was pressed on reports that 20 minutes passed between the time Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president. Rowe said it was the “first” he was hearing of that and to his knowledge it was “incorrect.”
Abbate also testified about the timeline, saying approximately 25 minutes prior to the shooting, the Secret Service command post was notified of a suspicious person.
Abbate recently discovered video footage from a local business that shows the shooter getting onto the roof of the building at 6:06 p.m., and he was spotted by local law enforcement at 6:08 p.m. At approximately 6:11 p.m., Abbate said, a local police officer who was “lifted to the roof by another officer, saw the shooter and radioed that he was armed with a ‘long gun.’ Within approximately the next 30 second, the shots were fired.”
Drone system was down, Rowe says it could’ve prevented shooting
The acting Secret Service director said that if cellular capability was better on July 13, they could’ve launched a counter drone system sooner and potentially stopped the attack.
It is “something that has cost me a lot of sleep because of the eventual outcome of the assailant,” Rowe said.
Rowe said he grappled with circumstances that could have allowed drones to spot the gunman before he opened fire.
“That what if we … geo-located him because that counter UAS platform had been up? It is something that I have struggled with to understand,” he continued. “I have no explanation for, it is something that I feel as though we could have perhaps found him. We could have maybe stopped him. Maybe on that particular day, he would have decided this isn’t the day to do it, because law enforcement just found me flying my drone.”
The countering drone system was down for about two hours and went back online at 5 p.m., Rowe testified.
The gunman flew his own drone near the site hours before the shooting.
Shooter’s motive still unknown, social media account discovered
The FBI deputy director said in his opening statement that the investigation remains focused on motive, identifying any potential co-conspirators and building out the timeline of the shooter’s actions.
“Thus far, though absolutely nothing has been ruled out, the investigation has not identified a motive nor any co-conspirators or others with advanced knowledge,” Abbate said.
Abbate also told Congress that they recently discovered a social media account from 2019 to 2020 that appeared to belong to the shooter, but Abbate couched it as preliminary.
“There were over 700 comments posted from this account,” Abbate said. “Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” he said.
Rowe pressed on accountability in heated exchange
Rowe told lawmakers he is taking “immediate steps” to avoid repeating failures at the Trump rally including expanding the use of unmanned aerial systems to check unprotected areas, improving site communications with local partners and increasing the number of security details to address a heightened security environment.
Rowe also said he heard the calls for “accountability” and noted the Secret Service is reviewing the actions and decision-making of personnel leading up to the rally.
“If this investigation reveals Secret Service employees violated agency protocols, those employees will be held accountable to our disciplinary process,” he said.
Senators on both sides of the aisle said there needs to be “individual accountability” for who was responsible for what during the shooting.
A particularly heated exchange ensued between Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Rowe over why certain individuals had not been relieved of duty, with both men raising their voices. In the exchange, Rowe said Hawley was focused on one person rather than a whole investigative failure.
“Is it not prima facie that somebody has failed? The former president was shot,” Hawley pressed.
Rowe responded: “Sir, this could have been our Texas School Book Depository. I have lost sleep over that for the last 17 days.” Rowe was referencing the building that Lee Harvey Oswald was in during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Then just fire somebody!” Hawley exclaimed.
“I will tell you, senator, that I will not rush to judgment, that people will be held accountable, and I will do so with integrity and not rush to judgment and put people unfairly prosecuted,” Rowe responded.
‘No doubt’ Trump was hit by bullet
Sen. John Kennedy pressed Abbate on what struck President Trump.
“Is there any doubt in your mind or in the collective mind of the FBI that President Trump was shot in the ear by a bullet fired by the assassin?” Kennedy asked.
“Senator, there is absolutely no doubt in the FBI’s mind whether former President Trump was hit with the with a bullet and wounded in the ear. No doubt. There never has been,” Abbate said.
Last week, the FBI released a statement also emphasizing that what struck Trump was a “bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”
Abbate reiterated Tuesday that it was a bullet “100%.”
ABC News’ Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — With Tim Walz joining Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the campaign trail as her newly selected running mate, critics are blasting the Minnesota governor for what they claim was his failure to prevent a massive COVID-19 fraud scheme that has ensnared the state government.
According to federal charges filed over the past couple of years, at least 70 people were part of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that exploited two federally-funded nutrition programs to fraudulently obtain more than $250 million in one of the largest COVID-era fraud schemes anywhere in the nation.
The defendants allegedly used a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future to avoid tough scrutiny from the Minnesota Department of Education, which was supposed to be conducting oversight of the programs.
On Tuesday, shortly after Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper published a story saying the case was one of the leading “vulnerabilities for Walz.” By then, the pro-Trump group MAGA Inc. had already blasted out an email calling Walz “an incompetent liberal” for, among other things, “allow[ing] one of the largest fraud schemes to happen under his watch.”
“Governor Walz and the people he directly hired and oversaw lost half a billion dollars to fraud in a few short years as governor,” Joe Teirab, a pro-Trump Republican and former federal prosecutor running for Congress in the Minneapolis suburbs, posted to X on Monday night, just hours before Harris picked Walz. “Imagine fraud at that scale nationwide.”
So far, more than 20 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted for their roles in the fraud scheme. None have been sentenced yet. Two of those charged were found not guilty, and most are still awaiting trial.
“Defendants falsified documents, they lied, and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of meals to children in Minnesota during COVID,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said at a press conference in June, after the first trial in the case concluded. “This conduct was not just criminal. It was depraved, and brazen.”
But it may have also been preventable, according to a state audit released in June.
“[T]he failures we highlight in this report are symptoms of a department that was ill-prepared to respond to the issues it encountered with Feeding Our Future,” said the 103-page report, detailing the findings of a limited “special review” by Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor.
The state agency not only “failed to act on warnings signs known to the department prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to the start of the alleged fraud,” but its “actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud,” the auditor said.
The report said that while officials inside the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) had at times expressed concerns about the nonprofit, they felt hamstrung in acting on their concerns due to “operational challenges” during the pandemic, including limited ability to visit sites in person, and due to a “litigation and public relations campaign” from Feeding Our Future that included allegations of discrimination.
“While we acknowledge these factors created challenges for the department, we also believe MDE could have taken more decisive action sooner in its relationship with Feeding Our Future,” the audit report said.
According to the report, after laundering tens of millions of dollars, the fraudsters allegedly used shell companies to buy luxury cars, boats and jewelry, to travel and pay off debts, and to purchase properties in Minnesota and around the world.
After the report’s release, Walz said his administration can always “do better,” and said, “We certainly take responsibility” for any failures that took place.
The report, which hardly mentions the governor at all, does not find any specific fault with Walz or his immediate office. But Teirab and other critics say Walz still deserves at least some of the blame for the massive fraud.
“He owns what happens within his administration,” said Jim Schultz, a Minnesota business advocate and outspoken Republican who two years ago narrowly lost a race to become the state’s next attorney general.
“There was this massive fraud under his watch,” Schultz told ABC News on Tuesday. “To this day, he has never fired anybody, nobody’s been rebuked.”
Walz has said there have been leadership changes within state government, including at MDE, since the fraud occurred.
Teirab, who says he “helped investigate and prosecute the Feed Our Future fraudsters” when he was still a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota several years ago, wrote on X last week, “Tim Walz was asleep at the wheel, allowing a quarter-BILLION in fraud.”
A few weeks after five of the defendants were convicted of federal fraud charges in June, the Justice Department indicted five individuals for allegedly trying to bribe a member of the jury in the midst of deliberations, saying they offered the jury member $120,000 in exchange for a not guilty verdict.
One of those who allegedly took part in the bribery scheme was one of the defendants acquitted during the trial.
The Feeding Our Future case is not the only fraud scheme that has impacted Walz’s administration.
In June, another audit found that a second state agency failed to adequately oversee a program to pay frontline workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Auditors reportedly estimated that more than $200 million may have been paid to people committing fraud or otherwise ineligible to receive payments from the program.
“This wasn’t malfeasance,” Walz said in response to both audits in June, according to Minneapolis-St. Paul ABC News affiliate KSTP-TV. “Both of these cases, there’s not a single state employee that was implicated doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should have.”
According to Teirab’s campaign, a number of Medicaid-related programs have also suffered from fraud and waste under Walz.
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.