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  • 2016-01-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Eric Holder Participated in an Armed Takeover of an ROTC Office (en)
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  • On 2 January 2016, a small group of armed men occupied a headquarters building at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in an area south of Burns, Oregon. Among the many media narratives published about that issue was a claim that former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder had participated in a similar armed occupation of federal property during his college years at Columbia University. Social media users who repeated the claim about Holder typically cited a 1 October 2012 article from The Blaze (Report: Did Eric Holder Participate in 'Armed' Occupation of Columbia ROTC Office?) which stated: The Blaze cited a contemporaneous Daily Caller article credited to Ryan Girdusky and Charles C. Johnson which reported that: The latter article asserted that the details the student-led occupation, including the claim that the raiders were 'armed,' come from a deleted Web page of the Black Students' Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the SAAS. However, the archived material in question described not a student takeover of Columbia's ROTC office in 1970, but a completely different incident involving the student occupation of a different building in 1968: Although this excerpt refers to the 1968 protest as armed, that description was made long after the fact by the Black Students' Organization (a group that did not exist at the time of the protest), not the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS) group that actually took part in the protest. And the Daily Caller noted that contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator, a student newspaper, did not mention weapons. The Daily Caller article also linked to a speech in which Holder purportedly admitted to taking part in the 1968 Hamilton Hall protest. The article quoted a small portion of Holder's 19 May 2009 commencement speech at Columbia College but opted not to excerpt the portions bolded below: Although the Daily Caller's confusing narrative suggested that Holder had admitted to participating in the 1968 Hamilton Hall protest, he could not possibly have been part of that incident as he was a high school student at the time and did not begin attending Columbia until 1969. Moreover, the Daily Caller's source material described a protest at Hamilton Hall, while Holder talked about having staged a sit-in at Hartley Hall. Although the names were similar, Hartley Hall and Hamilton Hall were two separate buildings on Columbia's Manhattan campus. (Hartley Hall was a residence hall, while Hamilton Hall was an administrative/academic building.) The Wikipedia page for Hamilton Hall notes that it was the site of multiple civil rights protests during the time frame in question: The 1968 armed protest to which Daily Caller referred was the subject of a 28 April 2008 New York Times article that made no mention of guns or Eric Holder. Several months later, the Times published a piece that chronologically unlinked Holder from the purportedly armed 1968 protest: A 2010 GQ profile of Holder also foregrounded the conflicting timeframe: So while it is true Holder was politically active during his time at Columbia University, he didn't take part in the 1968 Hamilton Hall protest (at which students may or may not have been armed). He did, however, participate in a sit-in of an ROTC lounge a few years later, of which reports described him as being armed ... with bed linens. (en)
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