Journalism is not a crime: Agent who ‘chokeslammed’ photographer at Trump rally goes unpunished, report says

Violent incident at Trump rally in 2016 sparked outrage

A secret service agent accused of putting a Time magazine photographer in a chokehold and throwing him to the ground during a trump rally has been cleared of any wrongdoing, according to a report by Politico.

Chris Morris, a photographer for Time, said an agent at the 2016 rally choked him and slammed him to the ground as he tried to step outside a media pen at the event in Virginia when a protest erupted.

Video footage of the incident posted to Twitter showed the photographer on the ground, kicking out at the agent as if to protect himself. Another video shows the photographer cursing the agent prior to the physical altercation, saying: “F*** you.”

He also seemingly put his hand on the agent’s neck to demonstrate the choke hold the agent had placed on him.

A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report and other documents obtained exclusively by Politico found the agent William Figueroa’s actions to have been “reasonable”.

The agent denied that he intended to choke the photographer and investigators said that if the agent ended up holding the photographer by the throat, it was an accident, according to the website.

The probe, which spanned nearly two years, concluded that the “chokeslam”, which went viral at the time, was a legitimate use of force to resolve a potentially dangerous situation.

“We thus find that [the agent’s] use of force was reasonable based on the totality of the circumstances [and] was in keeping with USSS use of force policies and training tactics,” the DHS watchdog office declared in its report, Politico reported.

Press advocates have strongly condemned the outcome of the report,  and have said the decision reflects wider concerns about press suppression in the US.

“In recent years there’s been a disturbing pattern of some law enforcement agencies and some officers neither appreciating nor respecting the constitutionally protected role of the press,” Senator Patrick Leahy, an amateur photographer and photojournalist advocate, told the outlet.

Mr Morris, who declined to be interviewed regarding the incident at the time on what he said was the advice of a Time lawyer, spoke out about the incident for the first time, saying he was disappointed with the decision.

The photographer said that the report was in many ways factually inaccurate due to the lack of his statement.

“There are so many inaccuracies in the thing because I wasn’t able to give my side of the story, but now I’m glad I didn’t give my side of it,” the photographer told Politico.

“I’m a journalist … I’m white,” he added. “I can only imagine what black people or others in society go through when they go through something with law enforcement and then they read about it in a police report.”

Federal prosecutors decided not to bring charges against either Mr Morris or Mr Figueroa.

The decision coincides with heightened scrutiny of the Trump administration’s treatment of members of the press following  protests that erupted across the country in the months following George Floyd’s death in May.

Continued arrests of members of the press during the coverage and militant treatment of protesters caused widespread outrage.  

Among many incidents, Independent journalist Andrew Buncombe was detained, shackled, and assaulted after being arrested while covering protests in Seattle. In Minneapolis, a CNN reporter and crew were arrested live on air.

“Journalists and photographers should not be confined to ‘press pens’ for widely attended public events,” Mr Leahy added in a statement to Politico.  

“They should not be body-slammed. And they certainly should not be shot with rubber bullets or teargassed for simply doing their jobs and covering demonstrations, as they have been in Portland under the Trump administration.  

“This is America, after all, where our Founders wisely determined that a free press is essential to a free society.”