The New York Times - USA (2020-07-28)

A16 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020

PORTLAND, Ore. — Minutes
before midnight on Sunday, the
first firework of the evening
screeched low over the heads of
protesters gathered in Portland,
Ore., sprinkling them with white
flecks of light and ricocheting into
the federal courthouse that has
become a focal point of recent pro-
tests.
Some ducked under makeshift
shields to protect themselves
from the falling sparks, while oth-
ers cheered at the sight of the blaz-
ing projectile hurtling toward the
courthouse and the federal law en-
forcement agents inside: “This is
what democracy looks like!”
In recent weeks, protesters in
Portland have pointed laser
beams, lobbed water bottles and
trash bags and, in one case, ac-
cording to the Portland Police Bu-
reau, hurled an open pocketknife
at the officers guarding the court-
house; they have used power
tools, crowbars and bolt cutters to
yank down a fence. In Seattle,
demonstrators over the weekend
set fire to several construction
trailers at a youth detention facili-
ty, and protests in Richmond, Va.,
Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif.,
were also marked by fires.
Yet the nightly assault on the
federal courthouse has been part
of a much wider peaceful resist-
ance — high school students, mili-
tary veterans, off-duty lawyers,
lines of mothers who call them-
selves the “Wall of Moms” — that
began assembling nearly two
months ago in the wake of George
Floyd’s death at the hands of the
Minneapolis police. The aim, as it
has been in other cities, was to as-
semble for sweeping police re-
form and racial justice.
The raucous escalation in re-
cent days, brought about by the
deployment of federal law en-
forcement officers and the harsh
tactics they have used against
protesters, has prompted new de-
bates among the protesters over
their own tactics and goals.
Now battling nightly rounds of
pepper spray and impact muni-
tions fired by federal forces, some

activists worry that the nightly

clashes are distracting from their

demands for defunding or reform-

ing local police departments.

“To see people standing in Port-

land destroying property and not

actually doing the work of advo-

cating for Black people was dis-

turbing,” said Rachelle Dixon, the

vice chair of the Multnomah

County Democrats and an organ-

izer in the Black community. “I

think they’re a distraction from

the everyday needs of people of

color, especially Black people. My

life is not going to improve be-

cause you broke the glass at the

Louis Vuitton store.”

During the protests Sunday

night in Portland, organizers tried

to gently coax protesters away

from the courthouse, calling them

to the nearby Multnomah County

Justice Center to listen to

speeches. “We’re family now,”

said one of the speakers, a local ac-

tivist and artist who performs un-

der the stage name Itchy Trigga.

“We can’t allow the feds to break

up our family.”

But as the protest ticked closer

to its 60th consecutive day, pro-

testers regrouped in front of the

courthouse. Federal agents re-

sponded to the fireworks with tear

gas, sending protesters reeling,

and later began a pursuit through

Portland’s streets.

On Monday, the U.S. attorney in

Portland, Billy J. Williams, ap-

pealed for an end to the nightly

clashes. “I ask all Portlanders to

join us in working with communi-

ty leaders, faith leaders and busi-

ness leaders to find an end to this,”

he said. “The violence is wearing

this city out.”

Federal authorities announced

Monday that they had identified

100 additional U.S. Marshals Serv-

ice personnel to send to Oregon if

needed to relieve or supplement

the current force protecting fed-

eral property there. “We are also

determined to reduce the violence

aimed at the federal courthouse in

Portland by violent extremists,”

Drew Wade, a spokesman for the

Marshals Service, said in a state-

ment.

Yet even some of the demon-

strators who fear that the federal

presence has distracted from the

original Black Lives Matter mes-

sage say it is important for the

community to voice its opposition

to the dispatching of federal

agents to a city whose leaders

have opposed the deployment.

And protesting the militarized

federal presence, they say, is not

far off message from the long-run-

ning protests against the police.

And some of those who are not

engaged in the more aggressive

tactics being employed find them-

selves sympathetic to those who

are; the federal government, they

say, is repeatedly shooting at pro-

testers with tear gas, pepper balls

and other exploding devices, tac-

tics that have sent demonstrators

to hospitals.

“There may be people throwing

water bottles at officers. I’m not

going to do that because I don’t

see the point,” said Jennifer Kris-

tiansen, a family-law attorney

who joined the Wall of Moms last

week and was later arrested by

federal agents. “But if people want

to express their frustration in that

way, I’m not going to stop them.”

“There is room for chanting and

dancing and joyful noises and

there is also room for rage. We

make that space for each other,”

she said.

That sentiment has been ech-

oed by some of those in other cit-

ies who joined weekend protests

that also opposed the deployment

of federal agents in Portland.

Cat Brooks, a racial justice or-

ganizer in Oakland and the co-

founder of the Anti Police-Terror

Project, said Black Lives Matter

protests and the movement to

oust federal forces from cities

were “one connected struggle.”

The debate among organizers,

she said, is the tactics that pro-

testers should use. Her own view

is that protesters cannot be

blamed for responding forcefully

when confronted with rubber bul-

lets and pepper spray.

“I don’t consider property de-

struction violence,” she said. “Vio-

lence is when you attack a person

or another living, breathing crea-

ture on this planet. Windows don’t

cry and they can’t die.”

Organizers in Oakland, which

has a long tradition of loud pro-

tests, are watching closely

whether federal forces will be de-

ployed there.

“If the feds come to Oakland, it’s

going to make Portland look like

Disneyland,” Ms. Brooks said.

She rejected the notion, put for-

ward by Mayor Libby Schaaf of

Oakland, among others, that vio-

lence and property destruction re-

inforce President Trump’s mes-

sage that anarchists were taking

over the country’s streets.

“We could sit there and sing

‘Kumbaya’ and suck lollipops be-

tween now and November, but if

Donald Trump thinks it makes

sense to hit Oakland and Detroit

and some of the other cities with

large Black populations — then

that’s what Donald Trump is going

to do,” Ms. Brooks said.

In Seattle on Saturday, as a

large crowd marching through the

city stopped in front of a new

youth detention center, some went

and knocked over a nearby con-

struction trailer while others lit

fire to the construction buildings,

drawing cheers from the crowd.

Farther down the street, some

in the crowd smashed the win-

dows of buildings, including a

Starbucks, where a fire was lit in-

side.

Jamie Boudreau, who runs a

bar a block away, and who de-

scribed himself as a “100 percent”

supporter of the Black Lives Mat-

ter movement, said he was texting

his wife as the crowd went by.

Someone confronted him, accus-

ing him of taking a video of the

crowd. He said it escalated until

people were punching and spit-

ting on him and an employee. His

storefront windows were

smashed.

“I was like, ‘Guys, you are to-

tally targeting the wrong person

right now,’ ” Mr. Boudreau said.

“We’ve been on the marches. It’s

just so bizarre.”

In Richmond, a burst of vio-

lence over the weekend took resi-

dents by surprise, and broke what

Mayor Levar Stoney said had

been 24 days of peaceful gather-

ings in Virginia’s capital.

The gathering began peacefully

in Monroe Park on Saturday

night. Several hundred protesters

then left the park and began to

march through the city. But when

they reached the Police Depart-

ment, some in the crowd “became

very aggressive verbally toward

the officers there,” the chief of po-

lice, Gerald M. Smith, said at a

news conference. He said “the ri-

oters in the crowd” threw bricks,

batteries and rocks at the police.

He said the police took action to

disperse them after some set a

city dump truck on fire.

Mr. Stoney noted that bricks

were lobbed at firefighters who

were attempting to extinguish the

blaze. He said he suspected that

white supremacists were behind

the violence.

“People broke windows and

spray-painted private property

with hateful language,” he said.

“Frankly, it was disgusting.”

Joy, Rage and Suspicion: Complex Alchemy Shapes a Protest Movement

This article is by Kate Conger,
Thomas Fullerand Mike Baker.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MASON TRINCA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Federal agents detaining a protester in Portland, Ore., Sunday

night, left, and a demonstration outside the Mark O. Hatfield

Courthouse in Portland. As protests for racial justice have spread

to cities across the country, some of them have turned violent.

Kate Conger reported from Port-
land, Thomas Fuller from Oak-
land, Calif., and Mike Baker from
Seattle. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
contributed reporting from New
York, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
and Sabrina Tavernise from Wash-
ington.

WASHINGTON — Attorney
General William P. Barr will face
questions from lawmakers for the
first time in more than a year on
Tuesday in what is expected to be
a showdown over his interven-
tions in the criminal cases of Pres-
ident Trump’s allies and his role in
deploying federal agents to con-
front protesters demanding racial
justice in Washington and across
the country.
For Mr. Barr, a seasoned attor-
ney general who does not hesitate
to speak his mind, the hearing be-
fore the House Judiciary Commit-
tee will offer the highest-profile
platform to date to explain his ra-
tionale for the protest response
and other issues, like voter fraud
and the special counsel’s Russia
investigation.
But lawmakers on both sides
who have already made up their
minds on his tenure plan to use the
hearing to advance divergent ar-
guments about the Trump admin-
istration aimed as much at voters
in the presidential election in No-
vember as at Mr. Barr.
Democrats who run the House
Judiciary Committee intend to ad-
vance a case against the Trump
administration’s response to the
nationwide protests that grew out
of the killing of George Floyd
while he was in police custody in
Minneapolis.
They also plan to portray Mr.
Barr as wielding his power as the
nation’s top law enforcement offi-
cer to serve the president’s per-
sonal interests. Democrats will
ask about his intervention to rec-
ommend a shorter prison sen-
tence for Mr. Trump’s longtime
friend Roger J. Stone Jr. on seven
felony crimes — a sentence that
Mr. Trump has since commuted —
and to drop a charge against the
former national security adviser
Michael T. Flynn even though he
had pleaded guilty.
“Are you the A.G. for the coun-
try, or are you the A.G. for the
president?” said Representative
Karen Bass, Democrat of Califor-
nia and the author of a sweeping
policing overhaul bill that passed
the House last month and that Mr.
Barr opposes. “Do you represent
the American people, or is it your
job to protect, to cover up and to
facilitate corruption?”
Republicans, echoing Mr.
Trump’s own dire election-year
messaging, will seek to celebrate
Mr. Barr as a defender of the rule

of law from those who they see as

trying to use Mr. Floyd’s death as

cover to attack the police and to

endanger communities.

“You’ve got all this violence go-

ing on, and Democratic mayors in

these cities across the country are

just bowing to the mob, and yet

they try to criticize the attorney

general when his using federal

law enforcement is protecting fed-

eral property and, more impor-

tantly, enforcing federal law,” said

Representative Jim Jordan of

Ohio, the top Republican on the

panel.

“The attorney general is doing

an outstanding job,” he added.

Republicans are also likely to

press for details about the investi-

gation of a criminal prosecutor,

John H. Durham, appointed to

scrutinize the Trump-Russia in-

quiry that could shape voters’

views of Mr. Trump this fall.

No cabinet secretary relishes

testifying before lawmakers con-

ducting oversight, but Mr. Barr

has been unusually successful in

avoiding trips to Capitol Hill. He

has never appeared before the

House judiciary panel, which has

oversight responsibility for the

Justice Department, including

during his first stint as attorney

general under President George

Bush. And he has not testified be-

fore Congress at all since May

2019, when he appeared before the

Senate Judiciary Committee to

answer questions about the report

by the special counsel, Robert S.

Mueller III.

Long lists of topics for lawmak-

ers to question him on have accu-

mulated in the meantime. The

committee has about 40 members,

each of whom will get five minutes

to question Mr. Barr, so the hear-

ing is likely to last much of the day.

House Democrats have long

wanted to question him on his

handling of the Mueller report. A

federal judge has said that in sum-

marizing it himself before releas-

ing it, Mr. Barr put forward a “dis-

torted” and “misleading” account

that torqued public understand-

ing of it in a way that favored Mr.

Trump.

The House Judiciary Commit-

tee voted to recommend holding

Mr. Barr in contempt over his defi-

ance of a subpoena for grand jury

evidence gathered by the special

counsel’s investigation shortly

thereafter, though the full House

later decided to instead fight him

in court for those materials, and,

more recently, some of its mem-

bers have said he should be im-

peached.

But many other flash points

have come and gone since then,

and more recent fights may domi-

nate the hearing. For example,

Democrats are expected to try to

press him on the Trump adminis-

tration’s aggressive use of federal

agents at protests after the police

killings of Mr. Floyd and a Ken-

tucky woman, Breonna Taylor.

The Justice Department’s inde-

pendent inspector general has an-

nounced an investigation into the

federal response, including the

disputed and violent clearing of

protesters from Lafayette Square

near the White House last month

before a photo opportunity for Mr.

Trump in front of a church. The at-

torney general accompanied the

president, and the White House

initially said Mr. Barr had ordered

the clearance, though he later said

he had not given a “tactical” order.

Mr. Barr has since become the

face of a Trump administration

vow to send a surge of federal

agents into cities to battle violent

crime for an effort he is calling Op-

eration Legend, which he has said

would include 200 agents in Chi-

cago and Kansas City, Mo., as well

as three dozen in Albuquerque.

Against the backdrop of the dis-

puted use of federal agents to con-

front protesters and protect fed-

eral buildings in Portland, Ore.,

the announcement received ma-

jor attention.

But pressed for details, a Jus-

tice Department spokesperson

has refused to answer questions

about specifics of the operation.

Representative Pramila Jaya-

pal, Democrat of Washington, said

she was prepared to challenge Mr.

Barr on what she said was a dou-

ble standard in supporting Ameri-

cans protesting coronavirus-re-

lated stay-at-home orders while

opposing those protesting police

violence and racism.

“The ways Barr has under-

mined that and moved toward

simply satisfying the president’s

needs is quite stunning,” she said.

Democrats will also press Mr.

Barr on accusations raised in a

hearing last month that he has po-

liticized high-profile criminal and

antitrust cases, including the deci-

sions to scrutinize California’s

emissions deal with automakers

after Mr. Trump attacked it and to

harass marijuana sellers in states

that have legalized the substance.

They may also ask about Mr.

Trump’s firing last month of

Geoffrey S. Berman as the top fed-

eral prosecutor in Manhattan. Mr.

Berman has privately told con-

gressional investigators that Mr.

Barr unsuccessfully pressured

him to resign.

Mr. Barr and Republicans may

be more eager to talk about his ap-

pointment of Mr. Durham to in-

vestigate the law enforcement

and intelligence officials who

sought to understand Russia’s at-

tempt to tilt the 2016 election in

Mr. Trump’s favor and scrutinized

links to the Trump campaign.

Breaking with Justice Depart-

ment practices not to publicly dis-

cuss open investigations or hint

ahead of time that charges may be

brought, Mr. Barr has repeatedly

hinted at possible indictments and

could provide new details. He has

also suggested that he does not

think longstanding department

policy against taking actions that

could affect elections applies to

Mr. Durham’s work in the run-up

to the general election in Novem-

ber.

Barr Is Scheduled to Appear

Before House Judiciary Panel

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

and NICHOLAS FANDOS

Attorney General William P. Barr is expected to be pressed on

various issues, including his handling of the cases of Trump allies.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Parties push divergent

cases for the actions of

an attorney general.

WASHINGTON — An Army

National Guard officer who was

called in to enforce the crackdown

on protests in Lafayette Square

last month will tell lawmakers

that the demonstrators were

peaceful and “subjected to an un-

provoked escalation and exces-

sive use of force,” according to

written testimony made public on

Monday.

Maj. Adam DeMarco, an Iraq

war veteran who currently serves

in the D.C. National Guard, will

testify on Tuesday before a House

panel investigating the clash, giv-

ing the latest account of how Park

Police and Secret Service officers

violently cleared protesters away

from the White House. He intends

to testify that the harsh actions

were taken without provocation

or adequate warning just before

President Trump walked through

the area with senior administra-

tion officials to stage a photo event

in front of a historic church.

“From my observation, those

demonstrators — our fellow

American citizens — were en-

gaged in the peaceful expression

of their First Amendment rights,”

Major DeMarco will say, accord-

ing to the advance text of his re-

marks. “Yet they were subjected

to an unprovoked escalation and

excessive use of force.”

The clash on June 1, yards from

the White House, produced stun-

ning images as mounted police

and riot officers routed demon-

strators with smoke, flash

grenades and tear gas, minutes af-

ter Mr. Trump declared himself

“your president of law and order”

and “an ally of all peaceful pro-

testers.” Those events have

prompted some lawmakers, infu-

riated by the violent scene, to in-

vestigate who ordered the attack

on protesters and why.

The reckoning has been partic-

ularly acute in the military. Gen.

Mark A. Milley, the chairman of

the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the na-

tion’s top military officer, publicly

apologized for taking part in the

president’s photo op. Members of

the D.C. National Guard — a ma-

jority of whose personnel are peo-

ple of color — have both publicly

and privately lamented their role

in the protests.

The D.C. National Guard, typi-

cally deployed to help after natu-

ral disasters or to assist with man-

aging crowds and logistics sup-

port for large public events in the

capital, was called in with Guard

units from other states to help re-

spond to the growing protests in

front of the White House in the af-

termath of the police killing of

George Floyd and other Black

Americans.

The Guard’s job on June 1 was

not to clear protesters, Major De-

Marco will say, according to the

text, but to “hold a static line,” es-

tablishing a new security pe-

rimeter around the White House.

But he was taken aback, accord-

ing to his testimony, when the

Park Police began issuing orders

to protesters to evacuate the park

40 minutes before the city’s cur-

few began.

“From where I was standing,

approximately 20 yards from the

demonstrators, the announce-

ments were barely audible,” Ma-

jor DeMarco says, “and I saw no

indication that the demonstrators

were cognizant of the warnings to

disperse.”

Major DeMarco said that a liai-

son officer for the Park Police told

him that no tear gas was being de-

ployed against the protesters, but

that he felt “irritation in my eyes

and nose” that he identified as

tear gas. Later, he saw tear gas

canisters on the street. The Park

Police initially denied that it had

been used against protesters, and

then claimed the statement was a

“mistake.”

Major DeMarco also noted that

the equipment to build a barrier

around the White House — the

stated reason for clearing the pro-

testers — did not arrive until 9

p.m., more than two hours after

the evacuation order was given.

He called the episode “deeply dis-

turbing.”

Gregory T. Monahan, the acting

chief of the Park Police, will testify

on Tuesday before the House

Committee on Natural Resources,

along with Major DeMarco.

The episode at Lafayette

Square is the latest controversy

for the Park Police, which pros-

ecutors and defense lawyers say

has a reputation for fostering a

culture of recklessness. As a U.S.

Park Police patrol officer nearly

two decades ago, Mr. Monahan

was accused of conducting unlaw-

ful body cavity searches and pro-

viding unreliable testimony.

A spokeswoman for the Na-

tional Park Service said the alle-

gations were investigated and

“determined to be unfounded.”

Police Crackdown in Capital

‘Excessive,’ Guardsman Says

By CATIE EDMONDSON

An officer plans to

testify on a clash in

Lafayette Square.