Police forcibly removed protesters before Attorney General William P. Barr accompanied President Donald Trump to St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020.
Attorney General William P. Barr, center, stands in Lafayette Square across from the White House as demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd on June 1, 2020, in Washington.
One of the lingering questions has been whether Barr or other Trump administration officials abused their power and ordered law enforcement officers to remove protesters. While the crowd was overwhelmingly peaceful, Trump and his allies had fixated on other demonstrations that had sporadically turned violent in the days since Floyd’s killing, including in the nation’s capital.
But the inspector general report concluded that Barr did not actually issue that directive. According to the report, when Barr spoke to the Park Police captain, he was asking about when the protesters would be cleared. The report did not find any evidence that Barr said or did anything to speed up that timing. Instead, it said the U.S. Park Police and U.S. Secret Service, which are not controlled by the Justice Department, made the decision to empty the square.
In an effort to show that law enforcement could handle the protests without military intervention, the inspector general found, Barr deployed law enforcement under the Justice Department’s purview without ample preparation or direction.For example, some Bureau of Prisons officers arrived at Lafayette Square without shields because they did not know they were going to be assisting with crowd control, the report said.
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