Just The President Of The United States Bragging About Gunning Down Suspects, NBD

Off. The. Rails.

“We sent in the U.S. Marshals, it took fifteen minutes, it was over. Fifteen minutes it was over. We got him. They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him and in fifteen minutes that ended.”

That was President Trump at a rally in North Carolina yesterday describing the shooting of suspect Michael Reinoehl. 

Lawyers on Twitter recoiled in horror at Trump’s apparent admission of an extrajudicial execution of the Antifa supporter sought in the shooting of far-right Patriot Prayer activist Aaron Danielson during protest in Portland, Oregon on August 29.

Although, as The Intercept points out, it’s entirely possible that the “they” who “knew who he was” and “didn’t want to arrest him” are local law enforcement officials in Portland who had taken too long with the legal niceties of compiling an indictment based on actual evidence for the president’s tastes.

On the other hand, Trump did tell Fox’s Jeanine Pirro on September 12 that Reinoehl was shot as “retribution,” so he has been treating this as an execution for a month now.

Two and a half days went by, and I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the US marshals went in to get in, and in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.

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Unfortunately, the current president is not a reliable narrator. He could very well be trying to take credit for a gangland-style shooting, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened. Frankly speaking — and how else can we speak after four years of this nonsense — the president talks a lot of shit.

In fact, Reinoehl was shot by local officials deputized by the U.S. Marshal Service. There have been conflicting accounts of the killing, but multiple witnesses told The New York Times that the agents made no real attempt to arrest the suspect, firing off 37 rounds from four guns without announcing themselves as police officers, barely missing bystanders and killing Reinoehl within seconds.

While there were initial reports that Reinoehl threatened officers, it later emerged that his gun was in his pocket when he was shot. Officers claimed he was reaching for it, but they failed to record the encounter on their body cameras, so we’ll probably never know.

Naturally Attorney General Barr, who has consistently maintained that the presence of a weapon on the scene justifies any level of police violence, has blessed this as a clean shooting.

And maybe it is. But if so, it didn’t go down like the president tells it. Because either the police went there for “retribution,” or they went to make a legitimate arrest of a suspect. And the president can maniacally tweet “LAW AND ORDER” ten times a week, but extrajudicial death squad executions amount to anything but.

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Trump Boasts About Federal Task Force Killing Antifascist Wanted for Murder in Portland [Intercept]
‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist [NYT]


Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.