Chester Co. sheriff, a Trump fan, says Facebook post amid violence in Charlottesville was ill-timed
In a Facebook post on Saturday that has since been deleted, Chester County Sheriff Carolyn Bunny Welsh, a vocal supporter of President Trump, showed off her new purchase: a recently released book by right-wing provocateur and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza called The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.
The post came on the same day that white supremacists bearing tiki torches wended through Charlottesville, Va., chanting “blood and soil” and waving Nazi and Confederate flags. Skirmishes broke out in the streets as the marchers clashed with counterprotesters.
One participant, James Alex Fields Jr., allegedly plowed his car into a gathering of the counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 people. Fields’ mother said later that she believed he was attending a Trump event, not a white supremacist march.
In an interview at her West Chester office Tuesday, Welsh said that her post was not intended to deflect criticism of the white supremacists onto those who arrived to counter them.
“It was poor timing,” Welsh said.
At the time of the post, she said, she had not yet read the book.
