Barr claimed 200 FBI arrests in 2 weeks in Kansas City. He was only off by 199.
By Aaron Blake
July 23, 2020 at 12:09 p.m. EDT
President Trump is focused intently on making his 2020 reelection campaign about violence in Democratic-led cities. In that effort, he’s gotten official buy-in from two key Cabinet agencies: the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The DHS is spearheading a questionable and legally suspect crackdown effort in places such as Portland. And the Justice Department’s head, Attorney General William P. Barr, has been out front on bolstering Trump’s claims about the allegedly nefarious nature of the demonstrators.
On Wednesday, though, Barr made a remarkably false claim about these scenes — in a way that only reinforces the idea that officials such as him are aiding in the president’s effort to exaggerate them.
At a White House event, Barr played up the supposed success of “Operation Legend,” an effort to dispatch federal law enforcement, in Kansas City.
“We’ve named the operation, as we’ve said, ‘Operation Legend,’ and we started rolling it out a couple of weeks ago in Kansas City,” Barr said. “And just to give you an idea of what’s possible: The FBI went in very strong into Kansas City, and within two weeks, we’ve had 200 arrests.”
Except that’s not even close to true. As the Kansas City Star reported, we actually just saw our first federal charge since the operation launched — far from 200 arrests. The Justice Department clarified that Barr meant that there have been 200 arrests since December and connected it not to the new Operation Legend but to a precursor called “Operation Relentless Pursuit.”
“Legend is essentially a continuation of that,” the department said. Except, that operation began long before the May killing of George Floyd and had nothing to do with the racial-justice demonstrations.
Not only that, but the arrests Barr was referring to, according to the Justice Department’s clarification, weren’t just FBI arrests as he claimed; they also included local ones. So this wasn’t even a federal success tale that Barr was telling.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who like other Democratic mayors has resisted the federal presence in his city, denounced Barr’s false claim during an MSNBC interview.
“This isn’t terribly, I guess, inconsistent sometimes with what we hear from this administration, but I think it’s frustrating,” Lucas said. He added: “What I don’t want it to be is this sort of thing where they’re just saying Democrat-led cities or our cities are hellholes or anything like I’ve heard the president say before. And we actually get down to the violent-crime problem.”
But this is hardly the first time Barr has joined Trump and his administration in making questionable claims about what’s happening in cities such as Kansas City and Portland. Barr was instrumental in the clearing of overwhelmingly peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square in D.C. ahead of Trump walking across it for a photo op, lodging dubious allegations about what led to it.
Barr also has repeatedly played up the idea that these demonstrations are infiltrated and even taking directions from violent provocateurs, often directly invoking antifa. Barr has called it a “witches brew” of extremists. Trump has made similar claims, and the DHS in the past month said in a document that “anarchist and anti-government extremists pose the most significant threat of targeted low-level, protest-related assaults against law enforcement.”
Despite this, there have been relatively few arrests of individuals connected to antifa and very little evidence connecting the amorphous movement to the organization of the demonstrations.
An FBI document reviewed by the Nation, for instance, said the bureau “has no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence” connected to the May 31 violence in Washington that followed Floyd’s death.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/23/barr-claimed-200-fbi-arrests-kansas-city-we-just-saw-our-first/
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