Thread by @SethAbramson

(IMPORTANT) If you credulously bought into the recent Inspector General report about the Lafayette Square scandal in the summer of 2020, you need to read this article. The reality is much more nuanced than what you're now hearing. Please share this widely. theweek.com/donald-trump/1…

As most of you reading this know, I published a book with Macmillan in 2020—Proof of Corruption—that had a long chapter on Lafayette Square. From the moment I saw this IG report, I knew something was off.

The key, as ever, is the opacity of the conduct of Trump's Secret Service.

The Secret Service under Trump was politicized to a degree we've never seen before—indeed the head of Trump's detail was seamlessly moved to the head of his political ops in an unprecedented move. The Secret Service launched the Lafayette Square attack...and was never questioned.

The idea that a man like Glenn Greenwald, who claims to be circumspect about government action, would embrace a report that never spoke to any of the parties that artificially expedited the Lafayette Square clearing—well, it just confirms that Greenwald is no longer a journalist.

The IG report correctly notes that the Park Service had been working on replacing the fencing around the White House since 2014—a fact that might make you wonder where the urgency was in beating up protesters *six years later* just to "stay on schedule." Beyond that, it's a mess.

The issue that day was the *timing* of the fencing work—not the fact of it. The report establishes that the timing was not determined by the entity behind the fencing work, but by the Secret Service and AG Barr—both of whom expedited things *after* they knew Trump was coming out.

Given that the Attorney General and the Secret Service caught the Park Service entirely unaware with their *sudden demand for expediting and their precipitous clearing of the Square*, you'd think the IG would've spoken to both Barr and the Secret Service. Nope! The IG skipped it.

So we have 37 pages that does no more than tell us the Park Service was planning to do fencing work that day in the area a protest was occurring. Everything about the means of responding to the scenario was coordinated and led by the president's team—which knew he was coming out.

There's no evidence whatsoever that the Park Service was planning to kick the s*** out of hundreds of peaceful protesters in order to do fencing work six years into a fencing project. There's no evidence whatsoever that the Park Service brought in cops from the Bureau of Prisons.

There's no evidence whatsoever that the Park Service was in control of when the clearing of the Square began or how it was conducted as it was beginning—the Park Service simply began to participate in an action whose timing and means was determined by Barr and the Secret Service.

We will never know what the Park Service would have done without the intervention of Trump's agents on that day. And we will never know because the IG decided not to interview or even attempt to interview a single one of the many persons who could answer that question coherently.

I'd add that the media of the time reported out the info it was being given by the government and by eyewitnesses. Not a single Park Service employee told the media that the Park Service's plan that day was to kick the s*** out of scores of peaceful protesters. Because it wasn't.

There's a reason Barr showed up that day. A reason the Secret Service showed up that day. A reason the Bureau of Prisons showed up that day. A reason representatives from Barr's interagency law enforcement force showed up that day. To do what the Park Service was not going to do.

As I discussed in Proof of Corruption, the number of agencies that showed up to kick the s*** out of scores of protesters in Lafayette Square in 2020 was at least a dozen. The Park Service *didn't* call out all those agencies. Some of them were under Barr's direction at the time.

Because the IG didn't want the political hassle of interviewing folks from agencies outside the IG's jurisdiction, all we got was a Park Service statement saying they were planning on doing fencing work in that area that day and cooperated with the Barr/USSS in clearing the park.

And because the media didn't get the story exactly right—because its sources in the government weren't telling the story then that they've decided to tell now that the event is a scandal—it's allowing far-right websites and fake journalists like Greenwald to claim that it "lied."

This reminds me of the "blaze-orange hat" debacle of mid-January. PROOF exclusively reported that the Arizona Proud Boys were wearing such hats on January 6; CNN reported it; Gavin McInnes threatened to sue; CNN retracted; and guess who had it exactly right? PROOF did, of course.

My suggestion isn't that media be less ready with corrections—I actually think it needs to be *more* ready—but that every correction or retraction follow an extremely rigorous protocol to avoid over-corrections or erroneous retractions. Otherwise the media gets embarrassed twice.

Remember also that in the summer of 2020, Trump and Barr were in the midst of ginning up a "domestic terror threat" line of rhetoric to help Trump's reelection. To imply that the violence in Lafayette Square was coincidental is to ignore everything that was happening at the time.

Under normal circumstances, federal agencies would have avoided violence on that particular day—as doing fencing work 6 years into a project was not important enough to insert government violence into a situation that was already a powder keg nationally. The violence aided Trump.

Indeed, we *know* that the violence was the point because Trump gave a speech before he went to the church saying so and because he decided to go to the church under those circumstances in the first place and because it was his goons who launched the attack, not the Park Service.

Anyone who's written at length on these events finds it preposterous/embarrassing that anyone in journalism would accept the baseless narrative that the only reason violence occurred on that day is because the Park Service had fencing work it needed to do 6 years into a project.