President Trump is focused intently on making his 2020 reelection campaign about violence in Democratic-led cities. In that effort, he’s gotten official buy-in from two key Cabinet agencies: the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The DHS is spearheading a questionable and legally suspect crackdown effort in places such as Portland. And the Justice Department’s head, Attorney General William P. Barr, has been out front on bolstering Trump’s claims about the allegedly nefarious nature of the demonstrators.
On Wednesday, though, Barr made a remarkably false claim about these scenes — in a way that only reinforces the idea that officials such as him are aiding in the president’s effort to exaggerate them.
At a White House event, Barr played up the supposed success of “Operation Legend,” an effort to dispatch federal law enforcement, in Kansas City.
“We’ve named the operation, as we’ve said, ‘Operation Legend,’ and we started rolling it out a couple of weeks ago in Kansas City,” Barr said. “And just to give you an idea of what’s possible: The FBI went in very strong into Kansas City, and within two weeks, we’ve had 200 arrests.”