WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump "speaks for himself" on his values, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday in response to questions about the president's comments in the wake of a deadly white-supremacist march in Virginia earlier this month.
Tillerson was asked on Fox News Sunday whether he thought Trump was expressing American values of tolerance and equality in his handling of racially tinged violence during a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., earlier this month. The Aug. 12 rally has set off a national debate regarding free speech and sparked protests in Berkeley, Calif., on Sunday.
"The president speaks for himself," he said.
When host Chris Wallace then asked whether Tillerson was "separating himself" from Trump's remarks, Tillerson answered, "I've made my own comments as to our values."
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That was a reference to remarks Tillerson made Aug. 18 about inclusiveness and tolerance in a discussion of racial diversity and American values after violence that killed a woman who was protesting the white-supremacist rally. Trump has asserted that "both sides" were to blame.
Tillerson's remarks came after harsh criticism of Trump from National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, who denounced the president's response, telling the Financial Times that he wrote a letter of resignation but never submitted it.
"Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK," Cohn said in the Financial Times interview.
Cohn, who is Jewish, said the administration "must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups."
Tillerson had told a group of State Department interns on Aug. 18 that "we do not honor, nor do we promote or accept, hate speech in any form."
"Those who embrace it poison our public discourse, and they damage the very country that they claim to love," Tillerson had said.
Demonstrations have taken place across the country in response to the deadly Charlottesville rally. On Sunday, black-clad anarchists stormed into what had been a largely peaceful Berkeley protest against hate and attacked at least four people.
The group of more than 100 hooded protesters, with shields emblazoned with the words "no hate" and waving a flag identifying themselves as anarchist, busted through police lines, avoiding security checks by officers to take away possible weapons. Then the anarchists joined a crowd of 2,000 largely peaceful protesters who turned up to demonstrate in a "Rally Against Hate" opposed to a much smaller gathering of right-wing protesters.
Among those assaulted by the anarchists was Joey Gibson, the leader of the Patriot Prayer group, who canceled a rally Friday and was prevented from holding a news conference on Saturday when authorities closed off the public square Gibson planned to use. Gibson has said he launched Patriot Prayer after several supporters of Trump were beaten at a Trump campaign stop in San Jose, Calif., last year.
After the anarchists spotted Gibson at the Berkeley park, they pepper-sprayed him and chased him out of it as he backed away with his hands held in the air, accompanied by a masked man wearing football shoulder pads. Gibson and the man went behind a line of police wearing riot gear, who set off a smoke bomb to drive away the anarchists.
Earlier in the day, another group of left-wing demonstrators dressed in black attacked at least three men in the park, kicking and punching them until the assaults were stopped by police. Police also used a smoke grenade to stop one scuffle.
Authorities did not issue a permit for the second Sunday gathering in Berkeley, the one for right-wing protesters, and Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin had urged counterprotesters to stay away.
It had been canceled by organizer Amber Cummings, who encouraged supporters to stay away but said she would attend on her own.
By midafternoon Cummings had not appeared and left-wing protesters far outnumbered right-wing supporters.
Student activism was widespread during the 1960s free-speech movement at Berkeley, when thousands of students at the university mobilized to demand that the school drop its ban on political activism.
However, the violence in Charlottesville led San Francisco area police and civil leaders to rethink their response to protests.
Trump has condemned hate groups in the wake of Charlottesville but twice added equivocation about blame for violence and once said some "fine people" were among the white-supremacist marchers.
At a campaign rally before a largely white crowd on Tuesday in Phoenix, Trump decried the removal of Confederate statues -- the flash point in Charlottesville -- and blamed the news media for "trying to take away our history and our heritage."
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, however, said Sunday that there's now enough controversy around statues of Confederate leaders that they should be removed -- even though he'd once backed keeping them around.
Jake Tapper, host of CNN's State of the Union, asked McAuliffe to explain why he's now supporting local governments that want to remove statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and others in the wake of the violent rally.
Two years ago, McAuliffe had said such monuments should be untouched because "these are all parts of our heritage."
"The people that were in that battle, the Civil War, many of them were in it obviously for their own reasons that they had for that," McAuliffe told MSNBC in June 2015. "But leave the statues and those things alone."
McAuliffe noted Sunday that he'd made the comment directly after issuing an executive order to ban the Confederate flag from state license plates. He said even that action was "controversial" at the time. But the governor said it's now time to take things further after that initial first step, given how controversial statues of Confederate leaders have become.
"This was the first step, and now what we've seen after Charlottesville and around the county is those statues have very similar significance to what went on when I removed the license plates," McAuliffe said.
On Sunday, Tillerson rejected criticism from a United Nations committee last week that the Trump administration had failed in its response to Charlottesville and set a poor example for the rest of the world.
"We express America's values from the State Department -- our commitment to freedom, our commitment to equal treatment of people the world over," Tillerson said in the Fox interview, "and that message has never changed."
The leaders of Britain and Germany had previously said in response to Charlottesville that violence and bigotry must always be condemned.
Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert declined Sunday to directly support the president's contention that there had been "very fine people" among the white supremacist marchers.
Asked about that characterization, Bossert said: "I think you'll have to ask the president how he wanted to parse" characteristics of march participants.
"I'd ask you to ask the president for clarification," he said on ABC's This Week.
Asked for his own views about those marching with Confederate banners and Nazi symbols while hurling racial invective, Bossert said: "I don't think anyone chanting those things is a 'very fine person' -- period."
He did defend the overall tenor of Trump's remarks condemning racism, however.
"I can't be clearer," he said. "I think the administration's been clear."
Defense Secretary James Mattis expressed implicit criticism of Trump last week in impromptu remarks to U.S. troops captured on video.
Mattis says the country has "problems," and asks those in uniform to "hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it."
Mattis has not commented on the video, which was apparently recorded as he addressed troops in Jordan.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has defended Trump's remarks, saying in a statement on Aug. 19 that "the president in no way, shape or form believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways."
Information for this article was contributed by Anne Gearan and Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post; Laura King of Tribune News Service; Paul Elias, Jocelyn Gecker, Terry Chea and Marcio Sanchez of The Associated Press; and Noah Weiland of The New York Times.
A Section on 08/28/2017