Acting Chief Gregory Monahan said the dispersal began about an hour after trucks with fortified fences arrived near Lafayette Square after days of violent protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Shortly after the group was cleared, President Donald Trump walked through the area to take a photo outside the park’s St. John’s church.
“We didn’t clean up the park for a photo shoot,” said Monahan. “There was 100%, zero, with no correlation between our operation and the president’s visit to the church.”
Monahan said the Park Police operation “focused exclusively on cleaning up H Street and the north end of Lafayette Park to reduce the sustained level of violence it saw during the previous three days and then again on June 1” .
A DC National Guard commander, Adam D. DeMarco, will testify Tuesday that the fence arrived at the scene several hours after the cleanup operation began. Monahan said DeMarco “was wrong.”
DeMarco is also expected to challenge the Trump administration’s description of the crowd that night as violent.
“Protesters were behaving peacefully, exercising their First Amendment rights,” DeMarco is expected to say, adding that he was surprised that the clean-up operation began long before the 7 pm ET curfew established by Washington. , DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser. DeMarco, who described himself as one of the top National Guard officials on the scene, ran as a Democrat for Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District in 2018.
The operation was criticized at the hearing by Democrats as overly aggressive, while Republican members said “anarchists” and other agitators were in the crowd.
Monahan testified that the group fired “projectiles” at its officers, and that some people attempted to jump two rows of low fences on June 1 before clearance. In previous days, more than 50 Park Police officers were injured after “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, bottles of water, lit flares, fireworks and 2×4 wooden sections were thrown at them.”
Attorney General William Barr has defended the use of force to clear protesters, saying that his decision to disperse protesters followed signs that the crowd “was becoming increasingly rebellious.”
Monahan said she saw the attorney general in the park that night, but that the two did not have a conversation. (Monahan reports to the secretary of the interior instead of the attorney general).
Committee chairman Raúl Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, said he is concerned that the dispersion was motivated by “partisan hostility directed from above.”
Jody Hice, a Republican from Georgia, said he hopes members of Congress can “see beyond the partial scope” through which Democrats view the incident.
The tactics used to clean up protesters are also expected to come under scrutiny at the hearing, and are the subject of several investigations. Monahan has denied that his officers used tear gas, even after his spokesperson, Sgt. Eduardo Delgado said in an interview with the Vox website that “it was a mistake” to deny that the dispersants used were tear gas.
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