schiller
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am prosp 1 26
...OPERATION GIDEON IN THE SPRING OF 2020 was the Trump administration’s last-ditch attempt to oust Maduro. It began when a clique of Trump insiders, principally longtime personal bodyguard Keith Schiller, approached a Florida ex-Green Beret named Jordan Goudreau to organize a military coup. After meeting with a dizzying string of intermediaries in the professional Venezuelan exile community of South Florida along with Trump administration bigwigs (including Elliott Abrams and John Bolton), Goudreau secured a contract signed by Juan Guaidó himself, promising some $212.9 million to execute a coordinated defection of the top military brass alongside Cliver Alcalá, a Venezuelan general who had defected to Colombia in 2018.
But just a week before the operation was slated to launch, the DOJ indicted Alcalá on charges of conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism. The indictment contained no specifics other than a single mention of Alcalá’s supposed presence at a 2008 meeting of various alleged bosses in the alleged Cartel de los Soles, and one of the prosecutors working on it had informed his attorney two years earlier that the office had decided not to charge him for lack of evidence. Team Gideon should have taken the hint, but went ahead with the operation anyway, by which point the plot had reportedly been infiltrated by intelligence operatives on both poles of the ideological spectrum. The Biden administration indicted Goudreau on arms trafficking charges a few months before a documentary on him called Men of War premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In a recent interview with Max Blumenthal, Goudreau accused the CIA and its menagerie of assets in the Venezuelan perma-exile community of sabotage, but many of the amateurish details of Operation Gideon suggested that the sabotage call was coming from inside the house. Goudreau’s explanation for whythe intelligence community would pull the plug on its last hope of ousting Maduro before the 2020 elections, however, struck me as potentially … perceptive. “I just think … they were making a lot of money,” he told Blumenthal.
:{:{Without a doubt, many of “them” certainly were. The expatriate perma-opposition had long been flush with fellowships, stipends, and subcontracts supplied by USAID, which spent nearly $2.3 billion on democracy promotion and humanitarian assistance earmarked for Venezuela between 2017 and 2021; and corporate-funded think tanks like Hausmann’s Growth Lab, whose Venezuela research is endowed by a handful of Latin American oligarchs in the timber, banking, and petrochemical industries.}:
But by mid-2019, Guaidó, who reportedly received $98 million from USAID to sustain his shadow government, was facing an apparent liquidity crisis; in June, the Panama Postreported that his ambassador to Colombia had bounced a $7,000 check written to help settle a $20,000 outstanding tab at a hotel where the shadow government, USAID, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees were housing former Venezuelan military officials in advance of an anticipated coup. Even more lucratively, the Treasury Department’s increasing fondness for financial sanctions had spawned a $30 billion cottage industry of OFAC lobbyists and sanctions compliance specialists who charge retainers as high as a million dollars to help them navigate the Kafkaesque hell of excommunication from the global financial system—and whose livelihoods were threatened by the possibility of normalized relations.}:
A godfather of that industry happened to be a former Venezuelan embassy worker named Martin Rodil, who is currently wanted in Spain on charges of running a global extortion ring in cahoots with an Israeli special forces veteran and bot farmer accused of meddling in 33 elections. But in Washington, where he has been based for most of his career, Rodil is a classic policy entrepreneur: “consulting” rich Venezuelans hoping to “relocate” abroad by coughing up intel on the “illicit” financial activities of Venezuelan government linked companies, then “consulting” those same companies’ business partners on how to avoid running afoul of the punishing economic sanctions the Treasury Department imposes on countries it doesn’t like. Spanish law enforcement claims Rodil exploited the effective criminalization of Venezuelan commerce to extort no less than 20 million euros out of rich Venezuelans in recent years. Getting rid of Maduro and the sanctions regime that accompanied him would have shut down that gravy train.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/05/09/venezuela-coup-regime-change/
PICTURE THE FOLLOWING SCENE: Two former Venezuelan special forces soldiers are captured while trying to land on a beach in the United States. They confess on camera to being part of a wider plot to capture and kidnap the American president.
That same day, back in Venezuela, another ex-special forces soldier with connections to the longtime bodyguard of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, releases a video announcing the two men were working for his private security company, on a mission to detain and extract President Donald Trump and bring down the government in Washington, D.C.
Two days later, the Venezuelan foreign minister, who also happens to be the former head of the country’s feared intelligence agency, gives a press conference at which he chooses to deny only “direct” involvement in the operation. “If we had been involved, it would have gone differently,” he added, with a smirk.
What do you think the reaction would be here in the United States? Among political and media elites? In national security circles? Wouldn’t the U.S. press be running endless pieces denouncing and berating Maduro? Wouldn’t cable news be rolling on it? Does anyone doubt that the U.S. military would be preparing to attack targets across Venezuela in retaliation?
Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed over the past week — but in reverse, and without any sense of shock or outrage in the United States.
[In this photo released by Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication, Jorge Rodriguez shows a video of American Airan Berry, a former U.S. special forces soldier associated with the Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp USA, during a televised statement in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 7, 2020.]
On Monday, it was Venezuela that captured two former U.S. special forces soldiers, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, after what authorities described as their “botched beach landing in the fishing village of Chuao.” A video was released of Denman telling his interrogators that he had been tasked with capturing the Venezuelan president. Meanwhile, Florida-based ex-Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, head of the private security firm Silvercorp USA, appeared in a video alongside a former Venezuelan military officer in combat fatigues, in which he confirmed that Denman and Berry were working for him. (Press reports have since revealed that Goudreau had meetings with former longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller, had signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition, and also claims to have been in contact with the office of Vice President Mike Pence.)
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former director of the CIA, spoke at a press conference where he issued his very carefully worded denial: “There was no U.S. government direct involvement in this.” He also couldn’t help but brag to reporters about how it “would have gone differently” if the United States had been behind it. (Memo to Pompeo: Google “Bay of Pigs.”)
Who knows? Perhaps Washington wasn’t involved this time. Perhaps Trump is correct to say that this particular fiasco, which sounds like the plot of a bad Hollywood movie, “has nothing to do with our government.”
Then again, this is an administration of liars, fabulists, and grifters. Dishonesty is the hallmark of the Trump White House. Their denials, therefore, are pretty worthless.
Plus, there is the recent history to consider: the demonization and strangulation of Venezuela has been a bipartisan project in Washington, D.C., since the rise of Hugo Chavez and the socialist “pink tide” in the late 1990s. In 2002, the Bush administration encouraged and supported a (failed) coup against Chavez. (As I later reminded former Bush official Otto Reich — who was accused of meeting with the plotters beforehand — the CIA had warned him and his colleagues that a coup attempt would be made five days before it occurred!).
In 2015, the Obama administration made the absurd decision to formally declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. At the time, the United States was 11 times bigger in terms of population, 600 times richer in terms of GDP, and with a military budget 1,800 times the size of Venezuela’s.
In 2019, the Trump administration called Maduro “illegitimate” and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. So far this year, Washington has indicted Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism; refused to suspend crippling sanctions on Caracas despite the spread of Covid-19; and deployed U.S. warships near Venezuela in what has been described as “one of the largest U.S. military operations in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega from power.”
Regime change is the explicit policy of the U.S. government.
To be clear: The regime in Caracas is brutal, autocratic, and corrupt. More than four million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years; the president’s approval ratings hover around 10 percent.
But anyone who claims that U.S. opposition to Maduro is based on a concern for democracy or human rights in Venezuela is either dishonest or deluded. The United States has a long history of supporting strongmen around the world — and especially in Latin America. Think Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Or Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Or Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. The list goes on and on.
No, the real reason the United States is obsessed with toppling the government in Caracas is, of course, because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — but leaders opposed to both the United States and capitalism. In fact, Trump and his cronies have a habit of saying the quiet part loud. As former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe revealed in his book, “The Threat,” at a briefing with intelligence officials in 2017, Trump asked why the U.S. wasn’t at war with Venezuela, pointing out how “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”
In January 2019, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, told Fox Business: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
We do not know whether Trump and Co. were involved in the Goudreau-inspired attempted attack on Maduro. What we do know, though, is that they continue to try and starve and bully Venezuela into submission. If the Trump administration gave a damn about the people of that country, it would heed calls from everyone from the pope, to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, to a group of congressional Democrats, to suspend sanctions and help Caracas fight the spread of the novel coronavirus.
But it won’t — because it doesn’t.
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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-maintaining-his-own-scary-private-police-force-alarming-security-experts
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-security-force-232797
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Mich. — President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans.
The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.
But Trump — who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events — has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security.
Security officials warn that employing private security personnel heightens risks for the president-elect and his team, as well as for protesters, dozens of whom have alleged racial profiling, undue force or aggression at the hands of Trump’s security, with at least 10 joining a trio of lawsuits now pending against Trump, his campaign or its security.
“It’s playing with fire,” said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who worked on President Barack Obama’s protective detail during his 2012 reelection campaign. Having a private security team working events with Secret Service “increases the Service’s liability, it creates greater confusion and it creates greater risk,” Wackrow said.
“You never want to commingle a police function with a private security function,” he said, adding, “If you talk to the guys on the detail and the guys who are running the rallies, that’s been a little bit difficult because it’s so abnormal.”
Wackrow, who left the Secret Service in 2014 and is now executive director of a security company called RANE (short for Risk Assistance Network + Exchange), said if he were the lead agent at a Trump rally, “I wouldn’t allow it.” But he suggested it’s a tricky situation for the Secret Service. “What are they going to do, pick a fight with the president-elect and his advisers? That’s not a way to start a romance.”
Several past presidential nominees have used private security or, in the case of governors running for president, state police details. But the experts could not think of another example of a president-elect continuing with any private security after Election Day, when Secret Service protection expands dramatically for the winner. In fact, most candidates drop any outside security the moment they’re granted Secret Service protection.
Trump’s spending on private security, on the other hand, actually increased after he was granted Secret Service protection in November 2015.
Through the end of last month, Trump’s campaign had spent more than $1 million on private security contracting, compared with $360,000 spent by the campaign of his vanquished Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, according to Federal Election Commission reports. That’s despite the fact that every other aspect of her campaign operation dwarfed his. Overall, her campaign outspent his by nearly 75 percent.
Whereas Clinton’s security spending — like that of most presidential campaigns — went mostly to protection for her offices and payments to local law enforcement or security companies for ad hoc event security, Trump’s campaign took it to a whole different level. It built a robust private security force that traveled the country supplementing the protective personal security supplied by the Secret Service, and working to identify and remove possible protesters — or just people Trump and his allies had a bad feeling about — from his events.
The private security team has been present at each of the seven rallies on Trump’s post-election “Thank You Tour” and has removed protesters — sometimes roughly — at many stops.
That included about a dozen protesters during a rally here on Dec. 9 in a minor-league arena called the Deltaplex, where Trump mostly shrugged off the interruptions until he became impatient with a particularly disruptive protester. “Get ‘em out!” the president-elect instructed his private security. That appeared to spur Trump’s security director, Schiller, to venture away from the stage, where he arrived with Trump, and wade deep into the crowd to assist other private security personnel with the removal.
Before the end of the rally, Schiller returned to his place by Trump’s side, along with a Secret Service contingent of which he is often misidentified as a member. (Despite being — at 58 years old — significantly older than most agents, Schiller looks the part, invariably sporting a uniform of dark suits and white shirts, along with a Secret Service-issued perimeter pin, and maintaining an athletic 6-foot-4-inch, 210-pound frame.) Together, the entourage accompanied Trump back to the airport, onto his plane and back to New York. It was the same routine as Schiller and Trump repeated countless times during the campaign, and it likely will be repeated countless more times over the coming years, since Schiller is expected to follow Trump into the White House, according to multiple sources on the transition team.
In interviews with about a dozen people who interact with Trump, they said even as the president-elect’s Secret Service detail has expanded significantly since the election, he remains most comfortable with Schiller and his team. A native of New Paltz, New York, and father of two,Schiller has been director of security for The Trump Organization since 2004.
The Trump associates say Schiller is expected to become a personal White House aide who would serve as the incoming president’s full-time physical gatekeeper, though he might not be able to offer his boss the wide range of services he has in the past. For instance, federal law prohibits anyone other than law enforcement officers from bringing firearms into federal buildings, and there are even stricter rules about who can carry on the White House grounds or around Secret Service protectees. Schiller had been armed at times early in the campaign, but it’s unclear whether he continued carrying a firearm after Trump was granted Secret Service protection.
Even after the arrival of Trump’s Secret Service detail, which typically marks the end of any pre-existing security arrangement, Schiller never strayed from his boss’ side.
The associates say Schiller provides more than just security. Trump has been known to ask Schiller’s opinion on all manner of subjects. When people want to reach Trump, they often call Schiller’s cellphone and he decides who gets through to the boss.
Photos often show Schiller looming over Trump’s shoulder as he works crowds, standing sentry by the stage as Trump speaks, or ejecting protesters from rallies. He’s developed a small but avid fan base on Twitter, where Trump supporters cheer Schiller’s confrontations with protesters, pose for selfies with him at events and backstage, and praise him as a brave “American Eagle” who kept Trump “safe & sound.”
And Schiller, a registered Republican, showed signs of reveling in Trump’s campaign, creating his own Twitter account just before the first primaries to promote the campaign and chronicle his unique perspective from the trail. He occasionally channeled his boss’ attacks on rivals like Ted Cruz (“Wow Lyin Ted is becoming unhinged! So sad...,” he tweeted as Trump was clinching the GOP nomination over the Texas senator) and spread false claims about Democrats, including that 20 percent of Clinton’s campaign cash came from people who were responsible for the September 2001 terrorist attacks, that a grand jury had been convened to investigate her use of a private email server for State Department business and that Obama encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote illegally.
Yet Schiller mostly remains — as one former campaign aide put it — “the most important man no one has ever heard of.”
That influence comes from Schiller’s ability to essentially control access to Trump, acting as his liaison to everyone from staff and well-wishers to dignitaries — and even Secret Service agents.
“Keith is kind of a consigliere,” said a transition team official. “He knows all the players, all the properties. He has the confidence of Trump and of the family. To describe him as a body guy would be very, very beneath the role that he actually plays.”
A younger aide — possibly the campaign’s trip director John McEntee — likely will be tapped for the traditional body man valet-like role, while Schiller would fill a new type of a hybrid staff-security role, the official explained. “Keith knows Trump inside and out. He knows when he turns right and when it turns left,” the official said.
Yet Schiller’s tight relationship with — and protectiveness of — his boss has already complicated the Secret Service’s rigid protection protocols, say allies of the agency and independent security experts.
In March, when a 32-year-old man jumped a barricade and rushed toward the stage as Trump was speaking at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, Secret Service agents immediately descended on Trump from opposite sides of the dais, encircling him in a human shield as a handful of other agents tackled the man before he could leap onto the stage. About a second after the first two agents reached Trump, Schiller leapt onto the stage and moved to position himself between the scrum and his boss.
The response appeared tightly choreographed to the untrained eye — a phalanx of men in dark suits and close-cropped hair swarming to protect their charge.
But in law enforcement circles, Schiller’s reaction was panned as too slow and was the subject of disapproving conversation among agents, according to a law enforcement source briefed on the conversations. The source said one agent described Schiller as the “JV trying to keep up in a varsity game.”
Specifically, the source said that Schiller came from a position on the dais that the agents would have used to evacuate Trump if that were to have been necessary. “If that happened, they would have run right into Keith. He was about three seconds too late,” the source said.
Joe Funk, a former Secret Service agent who worked several presidential campaigns, said agents throughout their careers are “trained nonstop to react to different situations based on your position and distance from the protectee in what they call AOP, or assaults on the principal.” That includes intensive drilling as a detail before being deployed to protect a presidential candidate or president “to familiarize yourself with the people who you are going to be working with.”
Stressing that he wasn’t assessing the response to the Dayton incident, Funk said “without any slight to Keith or to any of the guys on his team, they just haven’t had the opportunity to go through the Secret Service training that would allow them to respond to a situation like a Secret Service agent would.”
Since retiring from the Secret Service in 2005, Funk has provided private security for presidential candidates, including Obama in the early stages of the 2008 campaign and Mitt Romney in 2012. In both those cases, he said that when the Secret Service took over, he almost immediately stepped aside. “My assignment was over. That was it.”
So Funk said that he was “very surprised,” while providing security for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign, to witness firsthand Trump’s “composite detail” including the Service and private security at multicandidate events during the primary. “I was under the impression that at some point this would be weeded out,” or that the private security would revert to more of a traditional staff role, said Funk, who is senior vice president at a private security firm called TorchStone Global. As for why that appears not to have occurred, Funk said “there may be a very good reason for it, but as a layperson on the outside looking in, I’m just kind of scratching my head. In my experience, this is unprecedented.”
Agents and their associates told POLITICO that Schiller and his team initially bristled at the Secret Service’s move to take the lead, and that the continued presence of the private security brigade at events has caused tension and in some cases gotten in the way of the Secret Service’s protocols.
During the campaign, Schiller and his team could be seen at rallies appearing to direct Secret Service agents, local police and employees of security companies hired for specific events.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks declined to respond to a series of questions about the private security officials, who is paying them, their relationship with the Secret Service, whether they’re armed and what their roles will be after inauguration. Instead, she said in a statement, “Trump rallies are incredibly safe events and are executed with support from USSS, local law enforcement and private security to ensure the safety and enjoyment of all guests in attendance. For further details please reach out to the USSS.”
Secret Service spokeswoman Nicole Mainor issued a statement saying, “The Secret Service does not provide information regarding our protective operations,” and referring to a section of the U.S. Code that outlines the agency’s obligations to protect the president-elect. As for the agency’s relationship with Trump’s security personnel and whether the Service has asked Trump to dial back his security or whether the security carry firearms, Mainor responded only: “The individuals you are referring to are staff personnel.”
Schiller did not respond to requests for comment.
In a little-noticed video interview recorded in Trump Tower less than two months after then-candidate Trump was granted Secret Service protection, Schiller said his team had “a great working relationship” with the Secret Service. “They bring their own set of assets, which is right now, we can use everything we can get, as far as the way the world is right now, and the campaign in itself. It’s inherently a risky business every day,” Schiller said in the interview, which was posted in January of this year.
But he also noted that he had received “some dignitary protection training through the Secret Service” when he was on the New York City police force, and he touted the capacity of the private security team he oversees. “We have the best assets money can buy, I can assure you of that, as far as protecting him, his family and his property,” Schiller told the interviewer, Rich Siegel, one of his childhood buddies from New Paltz.
Schiller explained that he has “more than a dozen people” working for him. While he said that “I’m no stranger to putting my hands on people,” thanks to his days in the New York City Police Department’s narcotics units, he added, “Things are different right now. I hire big guys who do all the fighting.”
The identities and numbers of the employees who constitute Trump’s private security operation — as well as other details — are not entirely clear. That’s partly because at least some of the costs — including Schiller’s salary at one point in the campaign — appeared to be split between The Trump Organization corporate structure and Trump’s presidential campaign, and also because the campaign paid many of its security officials, including several who continued working for Trump after the election, through opaque corporate structures.
Schiller himself was paid $181,000 for campaign work from July 2015 through mid-November, according to FEC filings, with some of it coming in the form of in-kind payments, likely indicating money paid to Schiller by The Trump Organization, and possibly reimbursed by Trump personally.
The campaign also paid $50,000 for “security services” during the second half of the year to a company called KS Global Group LLC. While the company, which was registered anonymously in Delaware in October 2015, bears Schiller’s initials, neither he nor the Trump transition team would comment on who is behind it.
Another company, Black Tie Protection Services, which a Trump campaign operative said is linked to Schiller’s team, was paid more than $106,000 in the final four months of the campaign.
And the campaign paid $28,000 for security services to a company called ASIT Consulting, which is owned by a 62-year-old former FBI agent named Don Albracht, who has been known to film and occasionally taunt protesters.
But by far the biggest recipient of Trump security cash is a company called XMark LLC, which boasts on its website that its employees have expertise in surveillance, “close quarter battle” and “tactical shooting skills" and that the firm “provided all PPD [personal protection detail] for Mr. Trump’s campaign travel to include all advance work and coordination with local law enforcement agencies, in support, throughout the country, until being relieved by the United States Secret Service in mid-November of 2015.”
Yet the company continued receiving payments from Trump’s campaign after that point, with $89,000 coming after Election Day. Its officials — including president Eddie Deck and vice president Gary Uher, both of whom are retired FBI agents — were seen policing the crowds at Trump rallies throughout the campaign, as well as during the post-election "Thank You Tour." The pair — combined with XMark and a retired New York City cop named Michael Sharkey, who also is associated with the company — have been paid nearly $579,000 and counting by the campaign.
Trump transition team sources say the thank you rallies are being funded by Trump’s campaign committee, but that Trump, as president, might headline rallies funded and organized by a still-in-the-works outside group that will be able to accept huge donations unbound by federal campaign limits.
While Trump’s Saturday rally in Mobile, Alabama, was the last one scheduled on the tour, he hinted to the crowd that he intends to resume the rallies as president. “This is the last time I’ll be speaking at a rally for maybe a while. You know, they’re saying as president he shouldn’t be doing rallies, but I think we should, right?” he said, prompting loud applause. “We’ve done everything else the opposite. Well, no, this is the way you get an honest word out, because you can’t give it to [he press] because they’re so dishonest.”
If Trump’s team continues funding the rallies using private money, it would have the right to “decide who can attend their events, including which opinions or speech they deem acceptable by attendees,” said Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
She co-wrote a post in March on the ACLU’s website bemoaning that the removal of protesters of color from this year’s presidential campaign rallies is “certainly not what we want our democracy to look like.”
Nonetheless, Rowland told POLITICO that as long as Trump’s campaign or an outside group “organizes and sets the rules for a private event, and a politician, including the president, is an invited guest, then the host can decide whether and when to revoke attendees’ invitations. That would make them trespassers and allow them to be legally removed.” If the rallies were funded or organized by the government, on the other hand, then only law enforcement could identify protesters for ejection and actually remove them, and only then for breaking the law, she said.
Trump’s private security team has taken full advantage of that latitude, and Deck, who appears to be the leader of the rally security unit, has served as the point of the spear.
Deck, a buff 62-year-old who at various times took to wearing street clothes to blend into rally crowds so he could sleuth out protesters, has drawn repeated complaints about excessive force and ejecting people solely because they don’t look like Trump supporters.
At an April rally in Harrington, Delaware, Deck was captured on video calling for assistance from Delaware state troopers to remove two young African-Americans separately. When one, Anwar Dyer, protested “I didn’t say anything,” Deck responded “I don’t care. You’re leaving. You’re leaving. And if you don’t leave, you’re gonna get hooked up, and I know you don’t want to get hooked up.”
A college student who attended a Trump rally in Tucson, Arizona, in March told POLITICO that Deck “grabbed my arm and angrily pulled me through the crowd,” adding: “I genuinely believe I was kicked out because I am transgender.”
At an August rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, Deck removed an 18-year-old Indian-American Trump supporter named Jake Anantha, who Deck accused of having protested at past Trump rallies. Anantha, a registered Republican who was wearing a Trump shirt, later complained to The Charlotte Observer, “Why are all these white people allowed to attend and I’m not?”
Messages left for Albracht and at XMark email and phone numbers were not returned. And it was not clear whether they would continue working with Trump’s security team in any rallies he might do as president.
Henry Brousseau — who alleges that he was punched in the stomach by Trump supporters after shouting “Black Lives Matter” at a March rally in Louisville, Kentucky — said Trump’s security “did not seem to be interested at all in public safety. They were there to keep the rally on message. They were being speech police.”
Brousseau, who was a high school senior at the time, and two fellow protesters were ejected. And now they’re suing Trump and his campaign, as well as the convention center for failing to provide adequate security, while also claiming that Trump’s calls to “get 'em out” were “calculated to incite violence against the plaintiffs.”
Brousseau said “it is a pattern of silencing his opponents" that is "unpresidential, undemocratic and un-American.”
Another lawsuit was filed three weeks before the election, in part by an African-American man who alleges he was punched, kicked and called racial slurs by Trump supporters at a November 2015 Trump rally in Birmingham, even after security arrived on the scene — all while Trump yelled “get him the hell out of here!” It calls on Trump’s campaign, the convention center and the city of Birmingham “to pay for damages, institute new procedures for security and issue a public apology to those who attended the rally in question and to the residents of Birmingham.”
A third lawsuit alleges that Schiller, Deck, Uher and two other Trump security officers assaulted a handful of protesters during a raucous protest outside the campaign’s Manhattan headquarters in September.
In an affidavit in the case, Schiller acknowledged that he struck one of the protesters in the head. But he says that was because he felt the protester “physically grab me from behind and also felt that person’s hand on my firearm, which was strapped on the right side of my rib cage in a body holster. Based on my years of training, I instinctively reacted by turning around in one movement and striking the person with my open hand.”
The protesters’ lawyers deposed Schiller, Deck and Uher in the days leading up to the Grand Rapids rally.
The judge in June ruled that Trump would not have to provide a deposition in the case, despite the assertion by the protesters’ lawyers that “Trump has had a substantial role in bringing about violence on the part of his security guards.”
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