Following Donald Trump’s March 8 victory press conference, the presidential candidate was asked a question by reporter Michelle Fields. Apparently the question about affirmative action wasn’t welcome, because before Trump could answer, she was grabbed from behind and dragged down almost to the ground.
The whole thing happened so fast, Ms. Fields didn’t see who grabbed her. But Washington Post reporter Ben Terris informed her that the man who had injured her was Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski is known for being combative and was once arrested for attempting to bring a loaded gun into the U.S. Capitol.
What’s also remarkable is that Fields works for Breitbart News, a media outlet that is unabashedly pro-Trump. Their handling of the incident certainly confirms that they are acting as an unofficial arm of his campaign. According to the Daily Beast, Lewandowski told Breitbart’s political editor Matthew Boyle that he had mistaken Fields for “an adversarial member of the mainstream media”—as if that would make assaulting a woman OK.
Despite sources saying Lewandowski admitted to grabbing Fields, Fields’s own statement saying she was grabbed, and a credible witness to the assault, the Trump campaign is denying that any assault ever took place. Not only that Lewandowski went on Twitter this afternoon to smear Fields as a woman with a history of making false accusations: “Michelle Fields is an attention seeker who once claimed Allen West groped her but later went silent.”
Michelle Fields is an attention seeker who once claimed Allen West groped her but later went silent. https://t.co/J86Ej42eYx
— Corey R. Lewandowski (@CLewandowski_) March 10, 2016
Lewandowski is linking to a report from a very controversial outlet and not one you would expect a major presidential campaign to invest credibility in, to say nothing of broadcasting accusations against Allen West that may not be true. Further, the report in no way suggests that Fields is unreliable. Indeed, the report says that Fields was sexually harassed and that she declined to comment on it:
To sum up, Lewandowski assaulted a woman, and there is a witness to the event. Lewandowski responds to this by first completely denying it happened and then dragging the name of the woman he allegedly assaulted through the mud based on a dishonest interpretation of a report from an extremely controversial web publication.
By any standard, this is pretty despicable.
