Gun-Toting St. Louis Husband Clashes with Chris Cuomo, Says He Faced ‘Terrorism’ from Protesters in Bizarre Interview

The AR-15-toting man who went viral along with this pistol-packing wife for brandishing weapons in the front yard of their St. Louis mansion as Black Lives Matter protestors walked down their private street engaged a lengthy, bizarre segment with CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump retweeted the widely ridiculed video of St. Louis lawyer Mark McCloskey, who was holding an AR-15 from the wrong side, and his wife, who widely swung a handgun around and often inadvertently pointed it at her husband, sending it rocketing around the Internet. From the CNN host’s very first question to McCloskey, who appeared alongside his own lawyer, Albert Watkins, the wheels on the interview started coming off.

“How do you feel about becoming the face of political resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement?” Cuomo asked, prompting an immediate, angry response.

“First of all, that’s a completely ridiculous statement,” McCloskey said. “I’m not the face of anything opposing to Black Lives Matters movement. I was a person scared for my life, protecting my wife, my home, my hearth, my livelihood, I was a victim of a mob that came through the gate. I didn’t care what color they were. I didn’t care what their motivation was. I was frightened. I was assaulted and I was in imminent fear they would run me over, kill me.”

When Cuomo pressed on whether any of the protestors physically menaced him, McCloskey shot back: “Did anything happen? Yeah. My life has been ruined.”

“I’m saying that night, did anything happen to you, your family and your property?” Cuomo clarified.

“Yeah, it’s called social intimidation, terrorism,” McCloskey insisted. “What is the definition of terrorism, to use violence and intimidation, that’s what happened to me. That’s the damage I suffered.”

McCloskey then pointed out that organizers of the protests that entered through a gate to walk down his street, which is private property, had said that they wanted the protest to be “disruptive,” but then conceded: “Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time, all I knew was that hundreds of people screaming, shouting, angry, broke through the private gate.”

“Any pretense of protests as opposed to terrorism ended when they broke through that gate,” he insisted.

When Cuomo then asked if McCloskey has any video showing the protestors trespassing on his property and attempting to break into it, the St. Louis man demurred.

“I’m not going to discuss the level of my private security on national television.”

“Oh, but do you have proof of them actually approaching your house?” Cuomo pressed, but was quickly cut off by Watkins, who advertises his legal services online with surreal, hard-to-believe language and, true to form, immediately went off on an incoherent tangent.

“You know, Chris, this is not a Black Lives Matters movement issue,” Watkins said. “This is a matter of not just one discussion we should have to have. We shouldn’t have to have this discussion. Every melanin-challenged old white man like me needs to listen and hear the message, the message of Black Lives Matter. What the second part of this discussion is, and it’s not mutually exclusive, is the rights — constitutional rights — of each and every citizen in this land. They can’t be compromised without recognizing that the message of Black Lives Matter will cease to have any meaning at all.”

After Cuomo asked Watkins why Trump retweeted the video, Watkins refused to answer and instead again wandered into absurdist rhetoric.

“I’m not going to speak for the president, in fact, quite frankly, I find it probably an impossibility for anyone to speak for the president. That’s assuming one wants to say the president speaks,” Watkins offered.

“I don’t even  know what the hell you are talking about,” Cuomo shot back, speaking for all his viewers.

McCloskey insisted the protestors weren’t there to demonstrate against police brutality, but to march on the St. Louis mayor’s house for her doxxing of BLM supporters in favor of defunding the police.

“I don’t like that you have been weaponized for political means,” Cuomo said, before taking a subtle shot at Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who had hosted McCloskey and Watkins just an hour earlier. “You said ‘I didn’t want to come on the show.’ Listen, I think I’m fair. I’m not going to use you as a pawn to advance my own agenda, like the show you just went on.”

Moments later, though, Watkins cut in again with a out-of-left-field filibuster.

“My client has since the very outset of this publicity made it really, really clear, the last thing he wanted to do. He and his wife are appalled at the prospect of being utilized as a rallying call for people sitting in Barcaloungers with a Confederate flag behind them and a 12-gauge in their hands. My clients have fought for lawyers as three-plus decades for the civil rights of people of color. My clients are completely behind and endorsed the message of BLM,” Watkins said, before a whiplash-inducing pivot. “What they are not capable of doing is embracing the abject utilization of that noble message that we all need to hear over and over and over again as a license to rape, rob, pillage, bowl over all of our rights…”

“That didn’t happen here, by the way,” Cuomo broke in.

“I beg your pardon, when you have a plan and a wife open their property in their home, with a full-on assault occurring by a mob,” Watkins declared.

“What full-on assault? They’re walking down the street in front of their house?” Cuomo pointed out, which unleashed a outburst of cross-talk from both lawyers.

“Chris, you don’t have your facts right,” Watkins exclaimed.

“Chris, you were not there,” McCloskey added.

“I’m just looking at the video!”

Watch the video above, via CNN.