President Donald Trump said he went down to the White House bunker during the protests in Washington DC to inspect it and not because of any possible threat, the Daily Mail of UK reported on Wednesday.
Trump denied a report he was taken into the secure shelter by Secret Service agents on Friday night out of concerns for his safety.
According to Trump “I go down, I’ve gone down two or three times, all for inspection and you go there, some day you may need it,” he said on Wednesday on Brian Kilmeade’s FOX News Radio show. “I went down. I looked at it. It was during the day, it was not a problem.”
The president reportedly spent an hour there on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the White House, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.
Trump was said to be furious at the image of himself in the underground bolt hole, which was designed for use in emergencies like a terrorist attack.
His tough crack down on protesters and march to St. John’s Church across from the White House on Monday where police used gas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful demonstrators from the area to make way for the president was, in part, a response to the bunker reports.
He described his time in the underground room as ‘more for an inspection.’
“I was there for a tiny, short little period of time,” he told Kilmeade in a 30 minute interview on Wednesday morning. “A whole group of people went with me as an inspecting factor.
In another news, The Army was making plans to send home active-duty soldiers who were dispatched to the Washington, D.C., area to bolster security amid unrest, but the plan was reversed on Wednesday after a meeting at the White House involving the defense secretary, defense officials said.
The meeting occurred after Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said in a news conference on Wednesday that he did not support invoking a law that would permit President Trump to use active-duty troops on American streets in response to the unrest.
Minnesota prosecutors added a second-degree murder charge Wednesday against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, and charged three more former officers in the death of George Floyd.
State Attorney General Keith Ellison announced the new charges in an afternoon news conference. “I strongly believe that these developments are in the interest of justice for Mr. Floyd, his family, our community and our state,” he said.
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