Texas police officers “laughed” and “joked” as desperate Joe Biden campaign aides pleaded for protection from a “Trump Train” of cars and trucks swarming and even colliding with the campaign caravan on a freeway last year, according to an amended lawsuit filed Friday.
Text messages, and recordings and transcriptions of several calls to the San Marcos Police Department captured at least one official’s joking, flat-out denial of help when contacted by a 911 dispatcher.
“We’re not going to do it,” said a San Marcos police corporal, The Texas Tribune first reported. “We’re not going to escort a bus.” He quipped that the Biden bus should “drive defensively and it’ll be great.”
When a 911 dispatcher told a campaign aide to call back if they felt threatened, the staffer responded: “Are you kidding me, ma’am? They’ve threatened my life on multiple occasions with vehicular collision” — and again asked for an escort along the freeway in south central Texas.
Despite the pleas for help, “there were no officers from San Marcos or any other police cars in sight” during the dangerous 90-minute highway confrontation, the suit stated.
The Biden bus and accompanying cars were chased by the “train” on the high-speed highway as they headed to campaign events a year ago.
In one collision, a Biden campaign car was videotaped being forced out of a lane by a pro-Trump trucker as surrounding vehicles were traveling some 70 mph. A man who identified himself as the driver in that crash boasted about “slamming that fucker” on Facebook.
After the reckless stunts that clearly imperiled the safety of all nearby drivers, then-President Trump crowed in a tweet: “I LOVE TEXAS!” and called the Trump train drivers “patriots.” He boasted that the confrontation was trending on Twitter.
The Biden campaign canceled events because of safety fears.
The lawsuit, filed by campaign workers and former Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis, who was on the bus, accuses the San Marco Police Department and city of failing to protect the campaign caravan “despite repeated calls for help.”
It also accuses officials of violating the federal Anti-Ku Klux Klan Act, which prohibits threatening or intimidating voters.
A second similar lawsuit against Trump Train organizers and participants also accuses them of violating the Anti-Klan Act.
When the suits were first filed, Protect Democracy counsel Cameron Kistler called the “mob of Trump supporters engaging in a preplanned vehicular assault” an “egregious example of using fear, intimidation, and threats of violence to silence political foes. This is exactly the type of behavior that the Klan Act was enacted to deter.”
The San Marcos Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
