Did Democrats Really Hire Protesters To 'Be Violent' At Trump's Chicago Rally?

By Stephen Gossett in News on Oct 20, 2016 3:38PM

Protesters outside Trump's rally in Chicago in March / Photo: Tyler LaRiviere

At Wednesday’s third and final debate, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party of planting paid protestors to foment violence at Trump’s Chicago rally in March. Trump, as expected, was referencing a video released by controversial conservative activist James O’Keefe, in which Democratic operatives appear to urge disruption.

The video features Robert Creamer—husband of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL-9th)—and Scott Foval, both of whom stepped aside from their roles following the video’s release.

“If you look at what came out today on the clips," he said, "I was wondering what happened with my rally in Chicago and other rallies where we had such violence. She’s the one, and [President Barack] Obama, that caused the violence. They hired people, they paid them $1,500, and they’re on tape saying, be violent, cause fights, do bad things.”

“When I saw what they did, which is a criminal act by the way, where they’re telling people to go out and start fist-fights and start violence,” he added. “In particular in Chicago people were hurt, and people could’ve been killed in that riot. And that was now all on tape started by her.”

Though its subjects hardly flatter themselves (especially Foval), the video is problematic for several reasons—as is Trump’s invocation of mayhem and violence.

Politifact does a good job of picking apart O’Keefe’s demonstrated history of selective editing and deliberately provocative sting tactics. They write:

"From the start, two things are clear: One, the videos are edited in ways that the context of the conversation or the meaning of the statement isn’t always clear, nor do you know when they took place. Two, Project Veritas’ undercover operatives are often goading their subjects with leading statements. It has the effect of making the viewer infer that the people said something that he or she didn’t literally say."

(NPR drew a similar conclusion in its own fact check.)

Politifact went on to write the Trump campaign provided no evidence of payment from Clinton or Obama—a charge that the video itself does not substantiate.

On the other hand, Trump’s claim that the Chicago “riot” reached a point that “people could’ve been killed” would seem to hold even less water. And when things did escalate during the March protest, Trump supporters played their part, as well.

“Scuffles happened, and I witnessed several,” Chicagoist politics reporter Aaron Cynic said in an interview with Muftah. “The crowd itself was non-violent as a whole, but there were violent people in the crowd (mostly on the Trump side). The scuffles I saw break out (4 or 5) were generally brought on by Trump supporters, who would flood in a group towards someone or a group that was either obviously anti-Trump, or looked like they could be (people of color, mostly).”

Kevin Pang, who covered the rally and protest for Chicago Magazine, would seem to agree. “It was an ugly situation of people yelling horrible things at one another, but comparisons to the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots are far-fetched,” he wrote in March.

Also, it follows that UIC's and Chicago's diverse demographics would object to Trump, payment-free, especially considering Trump was arguably at his height of xenophobic rhetoric at the time. Muftah wrote:

"On the evening of March 11, Trump was scheduled to hold a rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). UIC has a large minority population: 5% of its student body is African American (roughly 2,000) and 8.1% are Hispanic (about 3,500). 22% of the school’s population is made up of international students (approximately 10,000). Minority groups make up the majority of the city of Chicago itself. Out of a population of about 2,722,389 people, 39% are African American and 28.9% are Hispanic."

Several who attended the protest certainly seemed to agree: