Acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli says federal police in Portland, Ore., didn’t escalate violence there, asserting tear gas and rubber bullets were deployed in a “relatively limited fashion.”
In an interview on Sinclair Broadcasting’s “America This Week,” which aired Wednesday, Cuccinelli declared federal troops didn’t make violence worse, “we made it better.”
“Portland is the only place in America where there’s literally been violence every day since the George Floyd murder,” he said. “On three of those days the target was federal buildings. After that went on for several days in a row and we had intelligence that was going to continue and escalate, we advanced more law enforcement officers there who were not seen. They were inside the courthouse and did not come out for days during their patrol period.”
He said the federal officers followed the same “rules of engagement” as any police force would do.
“We have never gone …. beyond a less-than-lethal level of force,” he said. “Things like tear gas, sometimes rubber bullets… and those have been deployed in relatively limited fashion."
Cuccinelli said he doesn’t know where the groups’ funding was coming from for the extended period of racial injustice demonstrations.
“The people we deal with go by a variety of names,” he said, adding: “They all have two things in common, they dislike the United States and they are willing to use violence.”
“We have not discovered any coordinated funding effort,” he said.
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