According to the eyewitness accounts and a video of the encounter, a Secret Service agent grabbed a Times reporter by the throat and slammed him onto the ground at a Donald Trump rally on Monday in Virginia. The scuffle began when Chris Morris, the photographer for Time tried to take a picture of the Black Lives Matter protestors who were being ejected from Trump’s campaign rally at Radford University, Radford, Virginia by law enforcement officers. Morris said that he had stepped out of a media pen to capture the photograph when the incident happened.
After he was detained briefly and then released, Morris told CNN that he had only stepped out 18 inches when the Secret Service agent grabbed him and begun to choke him before slamming him down on the ground. The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has made it a rule to confine news media in a pen that’s enclosed by metal barricades at all his rallies. Photographers and reporters are instructed by his campaign to stay inside the pen. A video was posted by Time showing the agent choking Morris and then shoving him onto the ground.
Morris was also shown in other videos on his back with a camera around his neck and kicking the agent while he tries to subdue him. Morris can also be seen swearing at the agent and the veteran White House photographer also demonstrates how he was grabbed by the neck before removed from the rally to loud cheers by supporters of Trump. When Trump attacks the news media at his rallies, he is the recipient of raucous cheering. In Virginia on Monday, he told his supporters that half the media is ‘absolute sleaze’.
It remains unclear as to why confinement of the press to the pen is enforced by the Secret Service agents. Typically, campaign don’t prohibit reporters from taking interviews of spectators at their rallies. Between the candidate and media pen, there are hundreds of spectators and the candidate has a large security detail for keeping the public at a distance. Time said that they had expressed their concern to the Secret Service about the nature and level of the response by the agent to Morris. The magazine also said that Morris was also apologetic of the part he had played in escalating the incident.
The Secret Service stated that they were cooperating with local law enforcement for determining the exact circumstances that led to the scuffle and said they would provide more details as they came to light.