President Trump questioned whether NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, who pressured the racing group to ban the Confederate flag, apologized after a “slipknot” was found at his garage stall, but it was later discovered that there was no been a hate crime.
“@BubbaWallace apologized to all those great NASCAR drivers and officers who came to his aid, stood by him and were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to discover that it was all just another HOAX?” he asked in a Twitter post on Monday.
“That Flag decision has caused the lowest ratings EVER!” he continued.
A member of the Richard Petty Motorsports crew, which employs Wallace, found the rope in Wallace’s garage at Talladega Speedway on June 21 and alerted his crew.
The FBI launched an investigation the next day to determine if it was an act of intimidation against NASCAR’s only black driver.
“Today’s despicable act of racism and hatred leaves me very sad and serves as a painful reminder of how much further we have to go as a society and how persistent we must be in the fight against racism,” Wallace wrote on Twitter after the discovery.
Agents concluded that the rope was a rope to pull on the garage door and the video showed that it had been in place since October 2019.
The rope incident came weeks after Wallace, 26, led the charge that NASCAR banned the Confederate flag at its events.
“There will be a lot of angry people carrying those flags with pride, but it is time to change,” Wallace, who was driving a car with the words “Black Lives Matter” painted on the side, said last month. “We have to change that, and I encourage NASCAR: We will have those conversations to remove those flags.”
“No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race. So it starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them. “
Protests that erupted across the country after George Floyd’s death while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25 have spurred demands for police reform, led to the collapse of statues of historical figures and monuments, and have called to remove the names of Confederate soldiers from US military bases. .
Last week, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed legislation to remove the emblem of the Confederate battle from the state flag.
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