Shealah Craighead/White House
President Trump tweeted on Tuesday that a 75-year-old protestor who was shoved to the ground by cops could be a member of ANTIFA, the anti-fascist protest movement.

Martin Gugino, the protestor who was shoved to the ground, remains in the hospital with a “serious but stable condition,” per WGRZ. The officers involved with the shoving were charged with second-degree assault and was released over the weekend on bail.

Trump tweeted: “Buffalo protestor shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”

The conspiracy theory started on a far-right blog, Conservative Treehouse, and ultimately made it to One America News Network, a far right network according to Media Bias/Fact Check, where the president saw it.

Conservative Treehouse claims — without evidence — that Gugino used a phone as a “capture scanner” as a “method of police tracking used by Antifa to monitor the location of police.”

Kristian Rouz, who presented the report on OANN, said the incident “could be the result of a false flag provocation by far-left group ANTIFA.” Rouz previously worked for a Russian state media organization named Sputnik, per The Daily Beast.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” that the tweet was raising “questions that needed to be asked.” "So the president was raising questions based on a report that he saw. They're questions that need to be asked, and every case we can't jump on one side without looking at all the facts at play," McEnany said.

The tweet sidelined aides at the White House — Axios reported that “current and former” aides “seemed at their wits’ end” over the tweet. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that he “learned a long time ago not to comment on tweets and I’m not going to break that practice.”

 Congressional Republicans have stayed mostly silent, saying they haven’t seen it or didn’t want to “fan the flames.” However, Mitt Romney, a frequent Trump critic, said the tweet was “a shocking thing to say, and I won’t dignify it with any further comment,” NBC’s Frank Thorp reported.
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