Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe told a radio station in Richmond that the city of Charlottesville is to blame for what happened Aug. 12.
In an interview with Matt Demlein at Newsradio 1140 WRVA, McAuliffe said the state should have been in control on Aug. 12 and that he wished Charlottesville had never given the permit for the Unite the Right rally in the first place.
“We clearly, at the state, knew exactly what was happening,” he said. “The FBI and the [Department of Homeland Security] had been briefing us for quite a while and we passed all of it on to the city of Charlottesville.”
Unite the Right was billed as a rally in support of the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park. While it was scheduled to begin at noon, it fell quickly into chaos as white nationalist groups entered the park hours earlier and ralliers and counter-protesters clashed. An unlawful assembly was declared by late morning.
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That afternoon, area resident Heather Heyer was killed near the corner of Fourth and Water streets after a car drove into a group of counter-protesters. Later in the day, two Virginia State Police troopers died when their helicopter, which had hovered over the rally for much of the day, crashed in Albemarle County. Authorities determined that the helicopter crash was an accident.
In the radio interview, McAuliffe said the state had asked the city to move the rally “for a long time.”
“They never should have given the permit in Emancipation Park, that park is just too small,” he said. “The key to controlling a protest is to keep the two sides as far apart as you can.”
City Councilor and then-Mayor Mike Signer said the council was advised by its attorneys that any denial of the permit would have been struck down in court.
“Moreover, three troopers from the Virginia State Police met with council in closed session on August 3,” Signer said in an email Monday. “They had access to intelligence from the state-level ‘fusion center.’ But they failed to provide us with any evidence that could have met the ‘credible legal threat’ standard of specific planned violence that would in turn have enabled the city to deny the event.”
McAuliffe said he sent nearly 1,000 state police personnel to Charlottesville, and that current unified command laws need to be examined.
“I think we need to look at that, I think if we’re committing the most law enforcement we, the state, if we’re doing that, we should make the final decisions,” he said.
He said the city “finally at the last minute filed to move it” and then the ACLU filed a lawsuit.
“Unfortunately, the judge ruled with the ACLU against us,” McAuliffe said.
On Aug. 7, Charlottesville officials announced that they would only grant a permit for the rally if the event was relocated from Emancipation Park to McIntire Park due to the projected size of the rally. Organizer Jason Kessler, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the Rutherford Institute, was successful in petitioning a federal court to keep the event at Emancipation Park.
A motion for an injunction was granted on Aug. 11; a judge said he did so because testimony indicated that Kessler could successfully prove that the city revoked his original permit based on his ideas.
McAuliffe has made similar comments to NPR and WTOP regarding how the city handled the Aug. 12 rally, state control of the rallies and the ACLU lawsuit.
The ACLU of Virginia’s executive director, Claire G. Gastanaga, issued a statement in August about the comments directed at her organization.
“The ACLU of Virginia does not support violence. We do not support Nazis. We support the Constitution and laws of the United States,” she said in the statement. “We would be eager to work with the governor and the attorney general on efforts to ensure that public officials understand their rights and obligations under the law.”
She said they asked the city to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and ensure people’s safety at the protest, and that it failed to do so.
“Rather than seeking to scapegoat the ACLU of Virginia and the Rutherford Institute for the devastating events on Saturday, it is my firm hope and desire that the governor and other state and local officials will learn from this past weekend how constitutionally to prevent events like the horror we saw in Charlottesville from ever happening again,” Gastanaga said in August.
A report by former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy, with the law firm Hunton & Williams, was highly critical of both city and state officials at various levels on Aug. 12, including that they failed to adequately prepare for the rally, train officers and to effectively communicate during the rally.
Another report commissioned by the state focused on local permitting regulations and how state and local officials prepared for the rally, but did not go into as much detail as the Hunton & Williams report.
Allison Wrabel is a reporter for The Daily Progress. Contact her at (434) 978-7261, awrabel@dailyprogress.com or @craftypanda on Twitter.