Trump wanted facts before calling out racists. When I was on trial, he didnt care. [View all]

[spanone]

In President Trump’s instantly infamous Tuesday news conference at Trump Tower, he blasted critics of his slow, equivocating response to Saturday’s deadly events in Charlottesville by furiously insisting that one reason for the delay in issuing a statement about the tragedy was that “you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don’t know the facts. And it’s a very, very important process to me and it’s an important statement. So I don’t want to go quickly, and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement.”

He’s got a point: When someone is accused of a crime, or of inciting the kind of violence we saw last week in Charlottesville, we should gather the facts and carefully evaluate them before rushing to lay blame.

But here’s the thing: I’m one of the Central Park Five. When we were falsely accused of sexual assault, Trump had no qualms about jumping to conclusions.

...As I wrote last year: “When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink and sleep for more than 24 hours.” Under duress, false confessions were made. “Though we were innocent, we spent our formative years in prison, branded as rapists. During our trial, it seemed like every New Yorker had an opinion. But no one took it further than Trump. He called for blood in the most public way possible. Trump used his money to take out full-page ads in all of the city’s major newspapers, urging the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/18/trump-said-he-was-waiting-for-the-facts-on-charlottesville-when-i-was-on-trial-he-didnt/?utm_term=.9cc4ec7010b9