Cop at center of Inauguration protester trial exposed trashing liberal protesters on social media
Source: thinkprogress
Lawyers sought to establish that the government’s key witness is fundamentally biased against the people he was investigating.
Dec 12, 2017, 1:33 pm
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The lead investigator in the mass prosecution of leftist Inauguration Day protesters is a fan of Donald Trump’s right-wing internet tribe, attorneys showed jurors Tuesday.
Defense lawyers used cross-examination of Det. Gregg Pemberton to show jurors his affinity for Trump boosters like David Clarke and the One America News Network (OANN), and his antipathy toward the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
Lawyers juxtaposed Pemberton’s public comments with video of Inauguration Day protesters chanting “Black lives matter!” before their march, in an effort to establish that the government’s key witness is fundamentally biased against the people he was investigating.
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Pemberton also follows Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump Jr., Breitbart, James O’Keefe, and other key figures in laundering the racist invective of the so-called “alt-right” into a victorious mainstream political movement. And when the right-wing One America News Network needed an on-camera interview in 2016 for a story about which presidential candidate would get endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, Pemberton was their man......................................
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/cop-at-center-of-inauguration-protester-trial-exposed-trashing-liberal-protesters-on-social-media-7b6cab1a00c9/
Anyone who is a fan of Sheriff David Clarke is a bigot!
Key officer in Trump protester trial slanders black neighborhood in bizarre testimony
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-inauguration-trial-barry-farm-police-violence-5f1875e13ace/
Inauguration Day chaos reminded officer of his normal beat, where police violence is a daily terror for black Washingtonians.
Alan Pyke
Dec 5, 2017, 2:59 pm
Metropolitan Police Chief Peter Newsham, center, likely did not anticipate that high-profile trials of Inauguration Day marchers would draw his department's darkest day-to-day practices into the light. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Officer Michael Howden was supposed to help federal prosecutors establish that the group of protesters they want jailed for decades were assaulting cops wantonly the day President Donald Trump took his oath.
But on cross-examination, Howden quickly grew heated as defense attorneys showed him clips of himself saying things he claimed not to remember saying on Inauguration Day. In one of them, Howden said that herding anti-Trump marchers was nothing new for him.
“I’m fairly accustomed to that sort of rioting,” Howden is heard saying to another officer in a clip from Howden’s own body-worn camera footage from January 20. “Herding people through Barry Farm when they’re rioting, when they’re out of control,” he continued in the clip.
Barry Farm, anonymous to most anyone outside the Washington, D.C., area and even to many who live here, is a public housing development in the Anacostia area of the District. It lies in the Metropolitan Police Department’s 7th District, where Howden is typically assigned — and where MPD’s use of “jump-out” tactics and aggressive stop-and-frisk searches of civilians has drawn public scorn and official sanction in recent years. City elders are trying to tear the development down and redevelop it as gentrification hops across the Anacostia River, though residents have sued to halt the plan.
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