Charlottesville Mayor: It’s a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ I Issued Police a ‘Stand Down’ Order

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
COOPER: "You may be aware, and I want you to have a chance to respond if you want, that some right wing radio folks, TV hosts are suggesting that you and the governor issued a stand down order to police in charlottesville. To be on the record, did you give a stand down order, was this a stand down order?"
SIGNER: "So just to address -- I mean, we've seen the fact-free environment and the lies and the conspiracy theorys that are all over this universe. The alt-right universe. We are in a city manager form of government in charlottesville. Every Virginia city and county other than Richmond has a city manager form of government. The police chief does not report to me. If I wanted to issue a stand down order, I could not legally, a. And B, the police chief had a press conference yesterday where he stated categorically that no, no stand down order was issued. So this was conspiracy theory, false nonsense, and it's the job of you journalists, we in public life to navigate through these -- through these grenades that people with nothing better to do with their time, time, they're certainly not interested in achieving results through government or actually helping the working people in this country. I just have to kind of rise above it, because it's false."
COOPER: "Some of this is based -- I was trying to research where this comes from, and some of it came from an ACLU of Virginia tweet, that said, clash between protesters and counter-protesters, police say, quote, will not intervene until given command to do so."
SIGNER: "Right, which was unattributed. I mean, this is part -- I mean, we all pay a lot of attention to tweets. We can have a longer conversation about the fact that so much of not just dialogue but government in our country seems to be driven by what you can put in 140 characters. That was an unattributed tweet."