What Trump Told Us About the ICE Shooting

My colleagues and I sat in the Oval Office with President Trump just hours after a 37-year-old woman had been shot and killed by a federal agent.

We want justice! We want justice!

As soon as we started to ask the president about this deadly shooting in Minneapolis, he at first acknowledged the tragedy of it all.

With all of it being said, no, I don't like that happening.

But then almost immediately, he blamed the victim in this shooting.

She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over.

This echoes what we've heard from DHS and other federal officials. I noted that. That's disputed by local officials. The president responded by saying.

Well, I'd play the tape for you right now.

Do you want to just whip it out? It really didn't take long then for a staffer to come over to the president's side right behind the Resolute desk and actually hold up a laptop for myself and my colleagues playing a video of the incident. And as the video was playing, my colleague David Sanger actually said out loud,

It does not look like the ICE officer has been run over there.

The president continued to watch the video and, you know, took a little bit of a softer tone.

It's a terrible scene.

He acknowledged that it was a tragedy, but once again blamed the victim of this.

The woman in the car before she got shot, I heard, was unbelievably bad, badly behaved.

It was a remarkable moment where you have the president of the United States asserting that somebody was at fault in this incident, just as federal officials are calling for the public to refrain from making conclusions until an investigation is completed.

Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation.

This whole moment just showed the president's reflexive defensiveness over a federal crackdown that has at times turned violent and in this case also that has at times turned violent and in this case also impacted an American citizen as well.