Trump Wildly Claims Bystander Who Yelled ‘Shame!’ After Renee Good Shooting Was a ‘Paid Agitator’

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump repeated a baseless claim he has made before about the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent, accusing a bystander who yelled “Shame!” in the aftermath of being a “paid agitator” or “professional agitator.”

The fatal shooting of Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 was caught on video by multiple people, including a cell phone held by Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed her.

One video clip showed Ross walking away from Good’s vehicle as a woman shouted “Shame! Shame!” multiple times at Ross and the other ICE agents present. It is not clear if the woman shouting is the person recording the video or someone else standing nearby.

At Tuesday’s presser in the White House Briefing Room, Trump began by defending his immigration crackdown in Minnesota, which has sparked protests and a lawsuit filed by the state attorney general, by claiming that it was necessary because of all the “criminal illegal aliens,” “drug dealers,” “mentally insane,” and “brutal killers” that ICE agents had captured. As the president spoke, he thumbed through a pile of printouts labeled “MINNESOTA WORST OF WORST” that purported to show immigrants with criminal records that ICE had detained, holding them up for the gathered reporters to see.

“All ICE wants to do is get them out of our country,” he said, and send them back “to prisons and jails and mental institutions from where they came. That’s all they want to do — they’re patriots.”

Trump resumed holding up printouts, saying one man shown was a “murderer,” had “24 convictions,” and repeating again that “all they [ICE] wanna do is get him out.”

“They want to take him out of our country, and we’re met with paid agitators and insurrectionists,” said Trump. “Troublemakers. They’re paid.”

He then spoke about the scene after Good was shot:

You know, when the woman was shot, I felt terribly about that. And I understand both sides of it. But when she was shot, there was another woman that was screaming, “Shame, shame, shame, shame” — right? You saw it.

So loud, like a professional opera singer, she was so loud — and so professional. She wasn’t a woman that was hurt like, “oh, my heart’s injured.” She was a professional. “Shame, shame!” she’s screaming, “Shame, shame!”

I said, that’s not a normal person, that’s — that’s a professional. These are professional agitators and professional people that want to see our country do badly.

But that’s not happening because we have the hottest country anywhere in the world, despite this stuff.

Trump has made this baseless claim before on at least one occasion, as The Guardian reported on Jan. 9.

Writer Robert Mackey scoffed at Trump’s “claim that none of the protesters who oppose his mass deportation campaign are motivated by horror at what is being done to their neighbors, but must be paid operatives,” and noted that the president offered no  evidence for that accusation, just that the woman “wouldn’t stop screaming” and “was so loud and so crazy and just not normal”:

“When somebody sees something like that,” [Trump] said, referring to the point-blank shooting of a neighbor, “they don’t go screaming and screaming, and the same words. So, I guess you could say, professional, but I didn’t think she did a very good job.”

“You have agitators,” the president concluded, “and we will always be protecting ICE, and we’re always going to be protecting our border patrol and our law enforcement.”

“[T]he president’s assertion that only a paid agitator would scream at ICE agents carrying out immigration raids on the streets of American cities is contradicted by hundreds of recorded incidents over the past year,” wrote Mackey.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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