Mark McCloskey, the man who armed himself with a rifle and confronted Black Lives Matter protesters outside his home on Sunday, while his wife stood next to him with a pistol, is a lawyer who says he takes civil rights cases against police.
McCloskey and his wife, Patricia, emerged, armed, from their mansion on Sunday on a private road when “hundreds” of protesters burst through the gate.
Video of the confrontation went viral, and President Donald Trump retweeted it Monday.
In a statement Monday, the McCloskeys said that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement, but that they had been threatened by white “agitators” in the group.
According to his LinkedIn profile, McCloskey runs a personal injury law practice.
McCloskey gave an interview Monday to the local NBC News affiliate in St. Louis in which he said the supposedly “peaceful” protest had threatened him.
He also noted that he appears as an attorney in civil rights cases, and that he is currently representing a man who was allegedly beaten by police:
I do civil rights cases. Right now, I’m representing a young man who was assaulted by the police who is sitting in prison right now for being involved in a car accident after which the police came in and assaulted him. It’s on video. I’m not some kind of extreme, you know, anti- Black Lives Matter guy. I do these cases. I have been doing them for decades. I mean, I have on the wall of my conference room, I’ve got an anti-slavery broadsheet, the abolitionist broadsheet from 1832. It’s been there as long as I’ve owned this building. I mean, I’m not I’m not the enemy of people that really care about the Black lives, but I’m apparently the enemy of the terrorists and the Marxists that are running this organization.
McCloskey added that he and his wife had received death threats, and that the attention devoted to Black Lives Matter had distracted from criminal violence in the city, which he said had claimed the lives of innocent black people.
“There is there’s mayhem in the city every night. You never hear about it. There’ll be dozens of shootings, multiple deaths. No one seems to care about those black lives,” McCloskey said.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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