Trump stands by campaign manager charged with battery
WASHINGTON – In the latest bizarre twist in an incendiary presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s campaign manager was charged with battery Tuesday after a reporter alleged that he forcibly grabbed her following a news conference in Florida this month.
Trump stood by his manager, Corey Lewandowski, even after police in Jupiter, Fla., released a video that shows him reaching toward journalist Michelle Fields as she was trying to talk to Trump on March 8 at the Trump National Golf Club.
“Look at tapes – nothing there,” Trump tweeted, calling Lewandowski “a very decent man.” He also suggested that Fields was making it up and had changed her story.
In a response, Fields said she never did: “Seriously, just stop lying,” she tweeted.
Lewandowski, 41, was issued a summons for misdemeanor battery Tuesday morning by police in Jupiter. Fields, then a reporter for the Breitbart News Network, said Lewandowski pulled on her arm, leaving bruises, as she tried to ask Trump a question.
The Trump campaign said that Lewandowski is “absolutely innocent” of the charge. “He will enter a plea of not guilty and looks forward to his day in court,” a statement from the campaign said.
An unprecedented atmosphere of physical conflicts and violence surrounds Trump’s presidential campaign, with frequent skirmishes at his rallies. Trump has at times seemed to encourage the conflicts, saying at one point that he would like to punch a protester in the face. Trump has blamed the protesters for the violence.
The surveillance video shows Lewandowski following Trump through a crowd of people. Fields, holding up her cellphone, asked Trump a question; the video shows Lewandowski reaching out and grabbing Fields’ arm. “Lewandowski then grabbed Fields’ left arm with his right hand, causing her to turn and step back,” the police report says, adding that it allowed the campaign manager to “catch up and get closer to Trump.”
“I can’t believe he just did that,” Fields said in audio of the encounter. “That was so hard. Was that Corey?”
Much of what happened also was captured on cellphone videos. A Washington Post reporter standing next to Fields told police that he saw Lewandowski reach out and “yank” her arm, causing her to lose her balance. Fields later tweeted a picture of her bruised arm.
Even so, the campaign and Lewandowski have continued to deny it happened.
“You are totally delusional,” Lewandowski said to Fields on Twitter a few days after the news conference. “I never touched you. As a matter of fact, I have never even met you.” In another tweet, he labeled her “an attention seeker.”
Breitbart, a conservative-news website, at first said it stood by Fields and asked for an apology – but later published a story that suggested Fields was mistaken, and might have been grabbed by someone else. Fields resigned in protest, along with the site’s editor and other staffers, who said the site had lost its journalistic principles to get in bed with Trump.
Another video of a March 20 event in Tucson, Arizona, shows Lewandowski reaching toward the collar of a young protester, who is then yanked back and pushes a man standing next to Lewandowski. The campaign says that Lewandowski did not grab the young man.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who also is seeking the Republican nomination, stressed that chaos and violence are ongoing themes of the billionaire businessman’s campaign.
“This is the consequence of the culture of the Trump campaign, the abusive culture,” Cruz told reporters while campaigning in Wisconsin. “When you have a campaign that is built on personal insults, on attacks and now physical violence, that has no place in a political campaign, it has no place in our democracy.”