Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told Newsmax on Tuesday that Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom is so far out to sea in his criticisms of President Donald Trump’s actions to quell the rioting in Los Angeles that he can no longer see the shore.
Newsom claimed the arrival of troops in Los Angeles escalated tensions between protesters and law enforcement, which he, like other Democrats, blamed Trump for intentionally inflaming. Newsom said Sunday that the state will sue the administration over the deployment of the National Guard earlier that day to help contain violent protests over immigration enforcement efforts in the city, a step Newsom called unlawful.
“I don’t think Gavin Newsome ever goes a little bit overboard,” Cuccinelli, who served in Trump’s first administration, told “American Agenda.” “He is so far off the ship, he can’t see it. And I will tell you that if you compare this to the nationwide riots in 2020, I am so impressed to see the president utilizing the National Guard quickly. As he said today: Look, if I hadn’t done this, LA would be much worse. And as we know, JD Vance was talking about this earlier today, also.
“The violence was already out of control before the president called on the National Guard … to help quell the violence. So, Newsom’s narrative doesn’t hold water with time, and what was going on in his state. And that’s not new for him. It puts him in a very difficult spot politically, but that’s his problem.”
Cuccinelli said if Newsom acted immediately to control the riots in Los Angeles, instead of encouraging them, the National Guard wouldn’t have been needed.
“But it was,” Cuccinelli said. “The president called it. We didn’t have the benefit of this when we were fighting the riots in 2020. I used Portland, Oregon, as an example. We had 340 officer injuries. No National Guard. [Democrat] Gov. [Kate] Brown of Oregon refused to call it, and President Trump did not exercise his authority at that time to do that. I would also say at that time, we didn’t get much help from the Department of Justice, either, much less the Department of Defense. This is a whole new world.”
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