Trump Meeting with Law Enforcement Officials about Deadly White Supremacists' Rally

WASHINGTON — 

U.S. President Donald Trump is meeting Monday with two of his top law enforcement officials about the deadly violence that erupted at a white supremacists' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend.

Trump returned to Washington from his working vacation at his New Jersey golf resort for a briefing on the unrest from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Christopher Wray, newly installed as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country's top criminal investigative agency.

Trump is under attack from key U.S. political leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, for not explicitly denouncing the white nationalist, neo-Nazis and other groups that staged the Charlottesville rally to protest the city's planned removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee.

Lee was the leader of the Confederate forces in the 19th century Civil War that was fought over the issue of slave ownership in the southern U.S. and statues of him, usually on horseback, have become a flashpoint for demonstrations in several U.S. cities.

Aides say Trump could comment further after meeting with Sessions and Wray, but the president ignored reporters' shouted questions about his views on white supremacists as he walked into the White House.

One woman, a 32-year-old paralegal named Heather Heyer, who had gone to the rally to protest against the white nationalists, was killed in Charlottesville when she was hit by a speeding car driven into a group of counter-protesters and another 19 were injured.

The 20-year-old driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., from the midwestern state of Ohio, was arrested and charged with murder and other offenses. Fields, reported by U.S. news accounts to have voiced Nazi sympathies in recent years, made his first court appearance Monday, but a Charlottesville judge refused to grant him bond, keeping him jailed pending more legal proceedings later this month.

On Saturday, as street fights between the white nationalists and counter-protesters escalated at the rally 160 kilometers southwest of Washington, Trump denounced "in the strongest possible terms this degree of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides."

But he declined to say whether he was rejecting political support from white supremacists, many of them Trump voters in last year's presidential election.

Trump facing criticism

Numerous figures from across the U.S. political spectrum assailed Trump's tepid initial response to the violence for seeming to blame the unrest on both the white nationalists and counter-protesters.

On Sunday, the White House said the president "condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred and of course that includes white Supremacists," the racist Ku Klux Klan, "neo-Nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.''

But Trump, who frequently posts his thoughts on his Twitter account, has not offered any more commentary on the Charlottesville unrest.

On Monday, Sessions told ABC News, "You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation towards the most serious charges that can be brought, because this is an unequivocally unacceptable and evil attack that cannot be accepted in America."

In another interview, he told CBS News, "We will not allow these extremist groups to obtain credibility."

Merck CEO pulls out of Trump pannel

Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck, a major U.S. pharmaceutical company, quit Trump's advisory manufacturing council because of Trump not "clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal."

Trump, in a Twitter response within an hour, said that since Frazier had quit the manufacturing council, he would now "have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!"

On Sunday, Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said says the deadly Charlottesville violence "meets the definition of terrorism."

McMaster, in an interview on ABC News, described the car's ramming into a crowd of counter-protesters as "a criminal act that may be motivated by this hatred and bigotry."

Vigils and protests

The victims were remembered at a vigil Sunday in Charlottesville, while people in multiple cities across the U.S. gathered to protest the violence and criticize Trump's response for not explicitly condemning far-right groups.

In New York, marchers gathered at Trump Tower to voice their displeasure, while hundreds of people rallied against white nationalist groups in Los Angeles. About 1,000 people gathered at another anti-hate rally in Denver.

A Seattle rally planned by a conservative pro-Trump group before the events in Charlottesville was met by counter-protesters, and police used pepper spray to break up crowds after fireworks were thrown at officers.

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