United States president, Donald Trump, said he went down to the White House bunker during the protests in Washington DC to inspect it and not because of any possible threats.
He denied a report he was taken into the secure shelter by Secret Service agents on Friday night out of concerns for his safety.
“I go down, I’ve gone down two or three times – all for inspection – and you go there, some day you may need it,” he said on Wednesday on Brian Kilmeade’s FOX News Radio show. “I went down. I looked at it. It was during the day; it was not a problem.”
The president reportedly spent an hour there on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the White House, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.
The protest was against cops’ brutality against a black male, George Floyd, who died in police custody.
Trump was said to be furious at the image of himself in the underground bolt hole, which was designed for use in emergencies like a terrorist attack. His tough crack down on protesters and march to St. John’s Church across from the White House on Monday – where police used gas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful demonstrators from the area to make way for the president – was, in part, a response to the bunker reports.
He described his time in the underground room as ‘more for an inspection.’
“I was there for a tiny, short little period of time,” he told Kilmeade in a 30-minute interview on Wednesday morning. “A whole group of people went with me as an inspecting factor.
“They said it would be a good time to go down and take a look because maybe sometime you’re going to need it,” he noted. “I’ve been down – that’d be number two, so two and half sort of, because I’ve done different things, but two and a half.
“But I looked I was down for a very very short period of time, a very very short period of time, I can’t tell you who went with me but a whole group of people went with me,” Trump added.
