By DCist contributor Becky Little
Hundreds of people gathered at the White House today—some moseyed over from nearby offices on their lunch break, while others had flown into D.C. this morning—to protest President Donald Trump’s termination of FBI Director James Comey.
Comey found out about the decision when he saw the news on TV in Los Angeles, and at first, he thought it was a prank. Plenty of the people demonstrating in front of the White House today think it’s a joke, too, if not a particularly funny one.
Until Trump fired him on Tuesday evening, Comey was leading an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. In the termination letter the president sent Comey via the president’s longtime bodyguard, Trump bizarrely thanked Comey for assuring him “on three separate occasions” that he wasn’t under investigation. Nevertheless, he said it was time to go.
On Wednesday at noon, at least 300 people gathered in front of the White House to call for an immediate and independent investigation of Trump’s relationship to Russia. One woman held a sign reading “Twinkle twinkle little czar / Putin put you where you are,” and someone had constructed a giant Trump head that floated ominously through the crowd.
Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, which helped organize the rally, led call-back chants like “Show me what autocracy looks like / This is what autocracy looks like.”
For about an hour, Wikler and other guest speakers like Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and Mike Breen, president and CEO of the Truman Center and Truman National Security Project, condemned Trump’s actions. They also called on Congressional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to get behind an independent investigation of Trump.
“We’re not going to be fooled by the tweets or by the official pretext,” Wikler said, referring to the White House’s claims that the firing had nothing to do with the FBI’s investigation. “This is about a president who wants to shut down an investigation that could expose the truth, and this is about a president who’s afraid of what the public will do if the truth is known.”
“And he should be afraid,” Wikler added, receiving cheers from the crowd.
MoveOn is also asking people to go to their senators’ home offices at 5 p.m. local time to continue pressing for an independent investigation.
This afternoon’s impromptu rally drew people not only from D.C. but around the country. One of the attendees, Tracy Cipolla, found out about the rally late Tuesday night at her home in Atlanta, Georgia. She flew in this morning.
“I was so agitated watching the news last night,” she said. “It just seems unbelievable to me that our country has come to this, that the president has fired the man who’s investigating him. If we don’t all stand up and fight, everybody—Republicans, Democrats, everybody—we’re going to lose it. We’re going to lose our country.”
Becky and Trevor Lewis, a couple from southern California, were in D.C. for their grandson’s graduation from Howard University when they heard about the rally and decided to attend.
“We don’t agree with whatever Trump does,” Becky said. “Especially the fact that he fired Comey,” her husband added.
Other attendees were people who work in downtown D.C. and came over for the rally during their lunch break. One of them was a woman named Nicole who grew up in Eastern Europe, and is concerned about what she sees as Russian aggression.
“I really hope that our government can get its act together to get to the bottom of what’s going on,” she said.
Towards the end of the rally, a white woman dressed in all red showed up with a different kind of message. “Build the wall and come here legally,” she chanted as she approached the crowd.
This woman, Aimee Toska, hadn’t actually come to the White House to protest the rally or support the border wall; her chant was an impromptu decision. She’d originally showed up with her handmade sign to protest the “blue wall of silence,” an unwritten rule among police officers that they won’t rat out their colleagues. Toska is a homeless D.C. resident who says that, after a cop beat her, the blue wall prevented her from receiving justice.
Toska clashed with rally attendees as she approached them with her pro-border wall message, and it was a strange sight to see. Outside the White House, people were arguing with a homeless victim of police brutality about Trump’s proposed border wall. All the while, Trump sat safely inside—unreachable to them all.
