California congresswoman and political agitator Maxine Waters refuses to take responsibility for the provoking remarks she made days before Derek Chauvin’s triple conviction.
What’s worse, she’s actually playing victim.
In a tweet posted Saturday, she tried to justify her comments by shoving the “police keep killing us” narrative in everyone’s face.
“If we take a knee, they’re mad. If we speak up like I do, they’re mad. If we protest like Martin Luther King Jr. taught us to do, they’re mad. What is it that they expect us to do when police keep killing us?” she wrote.
If you aren’t familiar, during a protest in Brooklyn Center, Waters encouraged people to “take to the streets” if Derek Chauvin was not found guilty of murder.
“We’re looking for a guilty verdict,” Waters said. “And we’re looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place after they saw what happened to George Floyd, if nothing does not happen, then we know that we’ve got to not only stay in the street, but we’ve got to fight for justice. But I am very hopeful, and I hope we are going to get a verdict that says ‘guilty, guilty, guilty.’ If we don’t, we cannot go away.”
Asked in a follow-up question what protesters should do if Chauvin is not convicted of murder, Waters said, “we’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure they know we mean business.”
The judge in Chauvin’s trial criticized Waters’ comments, saying her words could be grounds for the defense to appeal a verdict.
Chauvin’s attorney requested the judge declare a mistrial over the comments, arguing she had prejudiced the jury.
While Judge Peter Cahill denied the request, he said that Waters’ comments were “abhorrent” and she may have handed the defense an opportunity to overturn the trial.
“I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned,” Cahill said as arguments concluded Monday and the jury began deliberating.
In a CNN interview Saturday, Waters accused the judge of being “way off track.”
“I’ve talked with a lot of legal scholars and lawyers, and of course, he was way off track and he knows that in fact the jurors were not in the room. The jurors have been - had an oath not to look at television, not to read the newspapers, not to engage with people on this. And so he knows that there was no interference with the jurors,” she said.
“But he was basically frustrated and angry, I believe. But I am very pleased there are those beginning to write about Judge Cahill’s basic comments. And one thing I read that came from someone from CNN was that the judge was all off track and he knows that this is not the cause of an appeal,” she continued.
“Most of the time when you have a case like this they’re going to appeal it anyway, but to say that I’m going to cause an appeal really is not credible. And whether or not they have an appeal and even if they mention my name like the judge says, my comments, whatever, don’t matter anyway.”
