The White House added a meeting regarding the events in Charlottesville, Virginia to President Donald Trump’s schedule on Monday.
“Update: The President will meet with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Wray on Charlottesville at 11:30AM,” the White House emailed in an update to the President’s schedule Monday morning slightly after 9 a.m. ET.
The added huddle comes amid fierce criticism of the President, from even within his administration, over Trump’s response to a terrorist attack against a group of counter-protesters by an apparent white supremacist.
Trump on Saturday condemned violence on “many sides” of the conflict in a statement following the deadly attack — that is, the white supremacist groups protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville, and the various anti-fascist groups who had gathered in a counter-protest.
One man who had earlier been photographed with the white supremacist group Vanguard America, James Alex Fields Jr., was charged with one count of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and another count, the Washington Post reported, after allegedly ramming his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one person and injuring at least 19 others.
Sessions — who himself has been heavily criticized for his calls to intensify the war on drugs and for prosecutors to seek the harshest prison sentences available to them — defended Trump’s response on Monday, but also said Fields’ alleged crimes fit the definition of domestic terrorism.
An anonymous “White House spokesperson” eventually said on Sunday that “of course” Trump’s condemnation included “white supremacists, KKK Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups.”
Trump himself has not explicitly said so.