Report: Trump Campaign Manager Assaults Breitbart Reporter
But that’s not all.
Please tell me this is not true. Daily Beast:
Fields was walking next to Trump, on his right, when she pointed her recording device at him and asked if he still disagrees, as he said last December, with late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s attacks on affirmative action.
Before Trump could answer, Lewandowski grabbed Fields from behind, taking hold of her left forearm and “yanking her down toward the ground like a ragdoll,” a witness told The Daily Beast.
Fields—who on Wednesday was sporting a purple bruise as a result of the encounter—was shocked and shaken, barely managing to keep her footing as Lewandowski and the Trump scrum headed out the doors, according to colleagues.
Fields didn’t see who had grabbed her. At first, she has told colleagues, she thought it was a Secret Service agent.
“Oh my goodness!” Terris reportedly exclaimed after witnessing the encounter from a few feet behind. “That was Corey!” he told Fields in amazement.
Terris, who declined to comment for this story, has since confirmed to his newspaper that the aggressor was Lewandowski.
Nursing her bruises, Fields quickly recounted the incident over the phone to her longtime boyfriend, Daily Caller journalist Jamie Weinstein, who promptly tweeted:“Trump always surrounds himself w thugs. Tonight thug Corey Lewandowski tried to pull my gf @MichelleFields to ground when she asked tough q.”
Weinstein followed up with a second tweet: “Say what you will abt Bush or even Obama. They would never tolerate this type of thuggery toward women.”
Fields soon received an aggrieved phone call from [Breitbart PR consultant, Kurt] Bardella, telling her that Weinstein’s tweets were “juvenile,” and “immature,” according to sources, and advising her “to get your boyfriend under control.”
This part is especially distressing:
Meanwhile, as of this writing, Fields had yet to hear any supportive words—or anything, for that matter—from Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon or editor in chief Alex Marlow.
Matthew Boyle, however, did call Fields on Wednesday morning to ask how she was doing, the sources said.
Surely there must be more to this. Surely this organization would not treat its own reporter this way!
The worst part of all:
Lewandowski’s explanation to Boyle, said these sources, was that he and Fields had never met before and that he didn’t recognize her as a Breitbart reporter, instead mistaking her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.
How is that an “explanation”?
Look: Rick Tyler, Cruz’s former spokesman, was fired for retweeting a misleading video — and appropriately so. Now Trump’s campaign manager assaults a reporter, yanking her toward the ground, and bruising her . . . and nothing? This sounds like it could be the subject of a criminal charge, for goodness’s sake!
While the story of the assault by Lewandowski is sourced, I’ll note that this story about the behavior of Breitbart officials is largely based on anonymous sources. I really would like to believe that the parties involved, some of whom I know personally, would not behave the way the story describes. But everyone is clamming up about it, which leaves the story to be shaped entirely by the anonymous sources.
And which is completely bizarre, given the fact that the central figure of the story is the campaign manager for the Republican front-runner.
UPDATE: Corrected to “yanking towards” instead of “yanking to” the ground. Thanks to James B. Shearer.
