Lieberman’s Office Calls Cops on Tea Partiers

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Tea party activists were on Capitol Hill today lobbying their senators to vote against the pending health care bill. For the most part it was a pretty peaceful exercise in free speech. But Tea Party Patriots national coordinator Mark Meckler says this afternoon, he and a group of activists were met with some “pretty interesting thuggery” when they paid a visit to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s office, the man of the hour in the health care debate. Meckler says they went to Lieberman’s office, asked for a meeting, and were told that the senator was unavailable. Meckler told the staffers that the group would wait and they all sat down.

But unlike in Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office, where the group spent three hours this morning watching C-Span on nice leather couches while Senate staffers ignored them, Lieberman’s staff called the cops, according to Meckler. He says that within five minutes of sitting down, Lieberman staffers threatened “to have us arrested and throw us out. We said we were just going to hang out, but they said ‘you won’t be meeting with the senator,’ and they called the police.” He says six capitol police showed up and that it was “very intimidating,” so when the cops asked them to leave, “We did leave.” Lieberman’s office did not respond to an email seeking confirmation and the office phones are completely jammed, presumably with calls from other anti-health care activists. Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, a spokesperson for the U.S. Capitol Police, could not confirm the details of the incident, but said that any calls from Lieberman’s office may not have generated a report as long as no one was arrested.

UPDATE: Watch the video of the incident here.

 

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate