White House gives platform to conservative influencers to air grievances during ‘antifa roundtable’ – as it happened

So far, all of the fact witnesses contributing testimony at the White House “antifa roundtable” hosted by Donald Trump are self-described independent journalists or partisan conservative social media influencers who cover leftwing protests in a highly political manner, more akin to opposition research than nonpartisan reporting.

Several of them have described being assaulted in the course of their work by leftwing protesters they uniformly refer to as “antifa members” without evidence.

What the conservative new media figures have not mentioned is that several of them work by confronting leftwing protesters and filming the angry responses they provoke.

Others go undercover, disguised as leftwing protesters in black clothing, and then selectively edit the video they gather, ignoring peaceful protests to focus only on any instances of violence or conflict they witness.

One of the witnesses, Katie Daviscourt, whose coverage of protests outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland, Oregon, has been featured on Fox News, described being given a black eye recently when she was struck with a protester’s flag pole.

Shortly before that incident, a Portland police officer reported (in an email made public through the state of Oregon’s federal lawsuit to block Trump’s deployment of troops) that Daviscourt was one of three conservative influencers at the facility who appeared to be acting as “counter-protesters”.

“These 3 counter-protesters continue to be a chronic source of police and medical calls,” the officer wrote on 20 September. “Despite repeated advice from officers to stay away from the ICE crowd, they constantly return and antagonize the protesters until they are assaulted or pepper sprayed. They refuse or are reluctant to walk away from these confrontations, even when police are in the area trying to meet with them. They even engage in the same trespassing behavior on federal … property as the main protesters.”

Another witness, the conservative influencer Nick Sortor, complained of being arrested recently by the Portland police after a skirmish. However, video recorded on multiple nights in the past week shows that Sortor has repeatedly antagonized protesters in the course of filming outside the Ice facility.

One clip, for instance, showed that Sortor initiated conflict by trying to force his way through a protest encampment on a sidewalk near the Ice facility. He was then involved in a scuffle over an American flag he had previously taken from a protester who was trying to burn it.

The charges against Sortor were later dropped after an outcry in the conservative media prompted the head of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon, to threaten an investigation of the Portland police bureau over supposed anti-conservative bias.

The two women Sortor was arrested for fighting with still face charges, as does a Trump supporter who intervened in Sortor’s scuffle over the flag and punched a protester, knocking him to the ground.

The event is still going on.