On May 31, 2020, Antifa/Black Lives Matter-led rioters set the historic St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C. on fire during a night of particularly vicious rioting that had the city looking like an apocalyptic war zone.
Here are images of what the city looked like that night as well as the church:
The next day, President Trump gave a speech at the White House denouncing rioting and promising aggressive action to combat protest violence if states didn’t act to combat it themselves.
About 10 minutes before his Rose Garden speech started, the Park Police began forcibly clearing Lafayette Park where the protesters were, enraging the media who framed reports of what happened by claiming Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr had ordered them cleared and “tear-gassed” so he could walk from the White House to St. John’s Church in order to stage a photo op with Bible in hand.
It was an allegation Trump and Barr categorically denied. But as per the norm, the media had set a narrative and they weren’t going to let it go.
Here we are a year later, and an IG report released just today confirms Trump and Barr were telling the truth the entire time:
We found that the USPP had the authority and discretion to clear Lafayette Park and the surrounding areas on June 1. The evidence we obtained did not support a finding that the USPP cleared the park to allow the President to survey the damage and walk to St. John’s Church. Instead, the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow the contractor to safely install the antiscale fencing in response to destruction of property and injury to officers occurring on May 30 and 31. Further, the evidence showed that the USPP did not know about the President’s potential movement until mid- to late afternoon on June 1—hours after it had begun developing its operational plan and the fencing contractor had arrived in the park.
This meshes with what the acting Park Police chief claimed during a House Hearing in July 2020:
“We did not clear the park for the photo op,” acting Chief Gregory Monahan told the House Committee on Natural Resources in a hearing designed to examine the violent and subsequently contentious events in Lafayette Square two months ago. “There is, 100%, zero, no correlation between our operation and the president’s visit to the church.”Monahan said Park Police leaders had been informed earlier in the day that the president planned to visit the park to inspect damage created by the protesters, but they did not know when that would take place. The operation to clear out protesters was solely designed to restore order after the agency assessed that the situation on the ground had turned violent, and to follow through on prior plans to install more impenetrable barriers around the park, he said.
There’s egg on a lot of journalists’ faces tonight. We’ll take a look back tomorrow at some of their tweets and headlines from the past year where they accused the Trump administration of lying about what happened to see just where most of the eggs landed hardest.
Stay tuned.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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