Three weeks ago, The Washington Post wrote a story on the allegedly racist Covington Kids, smelling a pro-Trump rat. The online headline was “A viral story spread. The mainstream media rushed to keep up. The Trump Internet pounced.”
But on Thursday morning came a surprise: the front page of the Post carried a story headlined “Report finds ‘no evidence’ of racist talk by students.”
Reporters Frances Stead Sellers and Kevin Williams calmly recounted how Covington Catholic High School students rode a bus from Kentucky to attend the March for Life and were faced with “widespread condemnation online” for allegedly saying racist things or appearing racist to Indian activist Nathan Phillips.
Now, the Catholic diocese of Covington commissioned a report from an independent firm, which found no evidence of racism by the Covington kids.
The firm, Greater Cincinnati Investigation Inc., said four licensed investigators spent approximately 240 hours interviewing witnesses and reviewing about 50 hours of Internet activity, including posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and video from major networks.
On Wednesday, the diocese released the resulting four-page report. In it, investigators concluded that neither Sandmann nor other Covington students had behaved in an offensive manner that day.
“We found no evidence that the students performed a ‘Build the wall’ chant,” the report said, nor that the students made “offensive or racist comments . . . to Phillips or members of his group.”
The report concludes that some students did perform a “tomahawk chop to the beat of Mr. Phillips’ drumming” — an arm motion mimicking the swinging of a tomahawk that many Native Americans find offensive — “and some joined Mr. Phillips’ chant.” But the report makes no further comment on that behavior. – READ MORE