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April Ryan asks Trump to apologize to Central Park Five, but didn’t get the response she was looking for

June 19, 2019 | | Print Article
(FILE PHOTO by video screenshot/Getty)

President Donald Trump drew criticism from the far-left Tuesday after he refused to apologize for having once demanded that members of the Central Park Five be executed.

As the president was departing the White House early Tuesday afternoon en route to his presidential campaign launch rally in Orlando, Florida, CNN political analyst and American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan questioned him about his past comments regarding the four black teens and one Latino teen who were convicted for their involvement in the 1989 assault and rape of a white jogger named Trisha Meili.

Watch their interaction below:

“Mr. President, will you apologize to the Central Park Five?” Ryan asked. “They’ve been exonerated, there have been videos shown about the case, when you came out with a full page ad saying that they should die, that they deserved the death penalty.”

“Why do you bring that question up now?” the president initially responded. “It’s an interesting time to bring it up.”

Ryan, a known partisan hack and race-baiter who aligns strongly with the Democrat Party, likely pursued the topic to cajole a potentially “offensive” reply from the president. And just as she’d expected, the president continued by delivering exactly what she’d sought.

“You have people on both sides of that,” he said. “They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein, and you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we’ll leave it at that.”

This comment has since gone viral on the Internet and been used to bolster the false narrative that the president is a racist who boasts an inherent dislike for minorities.

Look (*LANGUAGE WARNING):

This was clearly the response that Ryan had hoped her partisan “journalism” would inspire.

However, one could easily argue that the president did nothing wrong. The ads referenced by Ryan in which Trump had called for the Central Park Five to be executed were posted long before the real rapist confessed to the crime and the five teens were exonerated.

When Trump posted the ads in 1989, everybody thought the five were guilty. Why? In part because the five teen boys had confessed to the crime. Though it was later learned that these were alleged forced confessions, nobody knew that at the time, including Trump.

So when he posted an ad in 1989 calling for the five teens to receive the death penalty, it wasn’t a sentiment unique to just him:

Also relevant to the discussion about the Central Five is the question of whether the defendants were as innocent as the media have portrayed. The evidence suggests otherwise.

When then-New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau sought to throw out all of the five’s convictions in 2002, both the original prosecutor on the case, Linda Fairstein, and several of the lead detectives that oversaw the investigation pushed back.

HERE’S WHAT YOU’RE MISSING …

To this day, Fairstein remains convinced that justice hasn’t really been served.

“That a sociopath named Matias Reyes confessed in 2002 to the rape of Ms. Meili, and that the district attorney consequently vacated the charges against the five after they had served their sentences, has led some of these reporters and filmmakers to assume the prosecution had no basis on which to charge the five suspects in 1989,” she wrote in a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

“The facts of the original case are documented in a 117-page decision by New York State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Galligan, in sworn testimony given in two trials and affirmed by two appellate courts, and in sworn depositions of more than 95 witnesses—including the five themselves.”

These facts show that the Central Park Five were certainly not “innocent of all charges against them.” The evidence shows, for instance, that some of the Central Park Five boys “held the jogger down and felt her breasts while others attacked her.”

“There were blood stains and dirt on clothing of some of the five,” Fairstein wrote. “And then there are the statements of more than a dozen of the other kids who participated in the park rampage. Although none of the others admitted joining in the rape of Trisha Meili, they admitted attacking male victims and a couple on a tandem bike, and each of them named some or all of the five as joining them.”

Given this information — all of which is being buried and ignored by the left-wing press — it’s not hard to understand why the president is hesitant about apologizing to the Central Park Five.

First, everybody else also thought they were guilty of rape. And second, though it’s now known that they didn’t rape the jogger, the evidence makes it clear they certainly took part both in the rape, albeit  directly, as well as in the other activities that occurred that fateful day on April 19, 1989.

Of course, none of this mattered to Ryan. She just wanted to score some points against Trump, and sadly, she’s succeeded at that goal. Such wonderful “journalism” …

HERE’S WHAT YOU’RE MISSING …

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Vivek Saxena
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