Protesters declared Trump Tower a crime scene Thursday as they picketed the former home of the 45th president who’s under a myriad of corruption investigations, from allegedly hoarding classified documents to inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Rather than wait for those investigations to conclude, the group Rise and Resist held up large crime scene tape at Donald Trump’s former pad — effectively declaring him guilty of the many crimes of which he’s accused.
“We feel that what Trump did around the election and trying to overturn the election, it really deserves criminal charges. And so, we’re out here and we’re frequently out here to call Trump out,” Jamie Bauer of Rise and Resist said while clinging to the tape.
The tape itself listed those alleged offenses: Fraud, for the alleged tax scheme in New York that led Attorney General Letitia James to launch a lawsuit against Trump and his family; Sedition, for Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden; Espionage, for hoarding numerous top secret documents recovered by federal agents during an August raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida; and Treason, ostensibly for Trump’s role in inciting the mob of his supporters that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The group displayed a large banner reading “Arrest Trump” while holding up images of him behind bars. Protesters also used his own words against him by calling him a mob boss for pleading the fifth when he himself had criticized others for doing so.
Passing pedestrians flipped a thumbs up to the banners while others decided to snap a few photographs. While the affair may have seemed like a catchy photoshoot to some, those behind Rise and Resist declared this an issue of top priority.
“This is the headquarters for the Trump Organization, the Trump Corporation, and it’s also where all his lawyers are, and it’s where his New York City based home is. So, it is a crime scene, particularly for the campaign finance violations, the money laundering, all the real estate corruption, you know, and it’s really like which crimes of his do you want to focus on?” Bauer said. “One of the things that we try to do by coming out here is to not so much chip away at his base, but to chip away at the independents and the people who voted him and sort of supported him and who were sort of believing the big lie about the election results.”
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