The former director of the U.S. Secret Service did not know when former President Donald Trump would walk to the fire-damaged St. John’s Episcopal Church during the 2020 George Floyd riots until he showed up and felt no pressure to clear the adjacent Lafayette Square of protesters beforehand, according to a new investigation.
In a Justice Department inspector general’s report that clashed with news reports at the time, then-Secret Service Director James Murray was told at 5:30 p.m. on June 1, 2020, that the president wanted to visit the protest site and “shake the hands” of police called in to protect the church after it was burned the night before.
But 40 minutes later, he was told the visit was “scrapped.”
Said the just-released report, “According to Murray, the next time he heard about the president walking outside, he was ‘walking across Pennsylvania Avenue’” to the church.
The 160-page report backed up an earlier Interior Department inspector general’s report that said Lafayette Square across from the White House and the area around the church were not cleared of violent George Floyd and antifa protesters because of Trump’s visit.
The new report went further, citing several law enforcement officials who said while they knew of the president’s wishes, there was no pressure to speed up the already planned move to clear the park and erect a tall fence.
A second Secret Service official cited by the report said that Trump’s plan to visit the site after giving a national address from the Rose Garden on June 1 “did not rush us at all.”
The report threw cold water on media reports at the time that the area was hurriedly cleared so that Trump could stand in front of the church for one of his most notable photo ops as president. He arrived with a Bible and held it up for photographers.
Those reports enflamed anti-Trump forces who were protesting the death of Floyd, a black man, who died a week earlier while in the custody of white Minneapolis police.
The Justice report is the latest to find problems inside the Secret Service over communications and preparedness, recently highlighted by the attempted assassination of Trump as he gave an outdoor speech last month in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The focus of the report was former Attorney General Bill Barr and reports that he pushed to clear the area for Trump’s walk. The report cleared him but was critical of his decisions during the tense days in late May and early June in Washington.
It was also very critical of the Justice Department and other agencies involved in the mid-summer crisis.
“Overall, we shared the serious concerns expressed to us by law enforcement personnel and were most troubled by the Department leadership’s decision-making in putting DOJ law enforcement agents and elite tactical units in close proximity to the public and requiring them to perform missions for which they lacked the proper equipment and training,” per the report.
It continued, “Multiple law enforcement witnesses told us that these deployment decisions appeared to have been made hastily and without sufficient understanding of, and priority given to, the capabilities of those deployed, and that leadership did not timely and effectively communicate their decisions to subordinates and other non-DOJ agencies involved in the response.”
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That report noted that “while we recognize that the civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder was a highly unusual situation” and there were significant challenges the department does not typically face, “ensuring the safety of its personnel and the public should remain its utmost priority.”
The report added, “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.”
