(https://www.thedailybeast.com/even-medical-workers-fighting-covid-say-cops-are-attacking-them-at-george-floyd-protests?ref=home)

Twenty minutes after leaving his job at a Brooklyn hospital on Saturday night, 32-year-old Rayne Valentine was lying in the fetal position on the sidewalk.

He'd been beaten and kicked by New York police officers, his hospital ID smeared with his own blood, he told The Daily Beast.

Valentine, a Marine veteran who worked as a chef before the pandemic hit the restaurant industry, got a job in March at Kings County Hospital Center. He has spent the past several months moving medicine and patients around the facility, as well as piling hundreds of dead bodies—many of them COVID-19 victims—into refrigerated morgue trucks.

Valentine told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that he needed a job, but, like many Americans, he also felt helpless and wanted to contribute on the front lines of the deadly pandemic. Unfortunately, his is just one of many horrifying stories of medical workers, firefighters, and paramedics who've been heralded as heroes—only to be tear gassed or beaten by police during the days of civil unrest following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.

“They needed people,” said Valentine. “The first day I was [at the hospital], we loaded up 45 bodies in a few hours. I saw a lot of the staff having breakdowns. It was scary for a lot of people.” But Valentine felt that his military background—serving four years overseas in the Marine Corps—meant he could handle seeing things that the average American may not be able to process.

But even his time overseas did not prepare him for Saturday.

When Valentine left work, around 11:45 p.m. that night, police were clashing with protesters nearby on Church Avenue, squad cars ablaze. He was trying to avoid the chaos and would have taken an Uber or another route “if I'd known” how close the skirmishes had traveled, he recalled.

“It's not a route I usually take. I had to take a double shift the next day, and they allow hospital workers to get hotel rooms,” said Valentine. “I was having a smoke and had my headphones in to try and decompress.”

But around midnight, he came across a “swarm” of police officers near the entrance to the Church Avenue subway station, chasing a “kid in this yellow and black hoodie,” and Valentine had his phone out recording.

“I stayed out of the way,” said Valentine. “I was up against one of the closed shops just recording. I didn't say anything to antagonize them. I was walking backwards as they shouted ‘back up.' And then this cop pushed me, and there were other cops hitting me on my legs and stuff too, but my head is the only thing that got seriously injured.”

In the video, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast, officers shout at Valentine to “move back” and he responds “I am moving back!”

During the beating, Valentine said, he kept getting kicked and his phone stopped recording. He said he told the officers, “I'm just trying to go home,” but that they responded: “Well, you picked the wrong time to do that.”
[...]

(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests)

Donald Trump has claimed to have spent only a “tiny” amount of time in a reinforced security bunker under the White House as protesters clashed with Secret Service agents outside and has insisted his time there was for an “inspection”, not his own safety.
[...]

(https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/antifa-trump-fbi/)

The FBI's Washington Field Office “has no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence” in the violence that occurred on May 31 during the D.C.-area protests over the murder of George Floyd, according to an internal FBI situation report obtained exclusively by The Nation. That same day, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he would designate “Antifa” a terrorist organization, even though the government has no existing authority to declare a domestic group a terrorist organization, and antifa is not an organized group. Following the president's tweet, Attorney General William Barr said in a statement, “The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.”

The FBI report, however, states that “based on CHS [Confidential Human Source] canvassing, open source/social media partner engagement, and liaison, FBI WFO has no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence.” The statement followed a list of violent acts like throwing bricks at police and the discovery of a backpack containing explosive materials, which were flagged by the FBI under a “Key Updates” section of the report. The FBI has been issuing such reports daily since the weekend, according to a Bureau source, who added that none of these documents contained any evidence of antifa violence.

Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” is a type of militant anti-racist, anti-nationalist organizing that does not rely on the justice system to confront the far right. Groups associated with antifa have destroyed property and committed violence in the past, but the fact that the FBI's situation reports cannot find any evidence of such involvement now suggests that fears about such groups may be exaggerated.

The report did warn that individuals from a far-right social media group had “called for far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents, use automatic weapons against protesters.”
[...]