Ellen Rosenblum, the Oregon Democrat Attorney General, said on Monday that the violent riots in Portland, Oregon, were “perfectly peaceful.”
Rosenblum, the national co-chair for the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), spoke to Politico on Monday, regarding the riots that have emerged in Portland, Oregon.
During the interview, Rosenblum described the violent attacks against law enforcement as “perfectly peaceful” and dismissed the targeted destruction of federal property by leftist mobs.
Despite Rosenblum’s claim, Attorney General William Barr told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that rioters in Portland, Oregon, brought “knives, rifles, and explosives” as they protested outside of the federal courthouse in Portland.
Barr said:
Every night for the past two months a mob of hundreds of rioters have laid siege to the federal courthouse and other nearby federal property. The rioters have come equipped for fighting. Armed with powerful slingshots, tasers, sledge hammers, saws, knives, rifles, and explosives devices.
Breitbart News also reported that Portland police found a bag with loaded rifle magazines and Molotov cocktails during the Sunday night protests.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) also noted that rioters brought an array of “contraband” to the protests.
Despite the vast array of reporting on the violent riots in Portland, Rosenblum downplayed the attacks against federal property, saying, “I’ve worked in the United States Courthouse. It’s a wonderful building. It’s not going to burn down from a small brushfire or a small firework.”
“There is no question about it, the violence in Portland is an assault on the government of the United States, and AG Rosenblum is doing nothing to support law enforcement and stop this madness,” the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) wrote in a press release on Tuesday.
Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general and the other co-chair for DAGA, backed the riots across many American cities.
“Yes America is burning. But that’s how forests grow,” she wrote in June.
Rosenblum also backed efforts to defund Portland’s police department.
Rosenblum said that “the city has changed its funding mechanism for some of the units of the police and I believe that the police have been responsive to that, perhaps not welcomed it with open arms, change can be difficult.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.