*Indebted to Raw Story, which had the exclusive this morning.*
First off, 2020 election loser and Capitol-insurrection promoter Donald John Trump has a known history of encouraging physical retaliation against peaceful protestors when speaking at his rallies.
So IMO, event planning staff of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Washington really should have anticipated and planned better to ward off any possible rough stuff, when they booked Trump's D.C. comeback speech into their facility concurrent with a strategy meeting of the Service Employees International Union.
An SEIU official told Raw Story that their group had no advance warning that Trump would be coming to the same venue.
Protestors outside the building that evening raised signs and chanted.
Inside, the SEIU group only then realized that Trump would be on-site. They hastily reorganized their program to acknowledge the fact and allow for a similar, ad hoc peaceful protest inside. They did not, however, leave their assigned, rented space, Raw Story was told. The two events reportedly were on different floors but seem not to have been completely sealed off from each other; the exact layout was not clear from the reporting.
Reportedly, the apparent private security hired for the Trump event had already intruded on the SEIU's rented space in the morning, going without masks through a breakfast buffet clearly marked for SEIU members only.
The group consisted of bulked-up white men in olive-green polo shirts with a distinctive logo and an olive-tinted American flag on the left sleeve.
TSA personnel reportedly screened attendees at the Trump speech. Normally the Secret Service would be also involved in protecting a former president, but it was unclear if Secret Service agents were interacting with the olive-shirted group or aware of their actions.
SEIU eventually determined that (contradictory to the initial impression) this unidentified group was hired not by Trump directly but by the Trump-supporting event sponsor, America First.
Video:
(More videos at Raw Story link.)
SEIU meeting attendees were chanting and holding a banner that read "Indict Trump" before they were attacked by the men in olive shirts, Raw Story reported. An SEIU employee told the news website that
....at first the police in the hotel didn't come to the protestors, it was only the white men in the fake-military shirts. They grabbed the signs from the SEIU protesters and assaulted two protestors, body-checking one of the staffers and shoving another.
The police ultimately stepped in to separate the groups. One video shows...that one of the fake security men tried to make the SEIU group leave, saying that they were no longer welcome...The man in the green shirt wasn't any kind of authority with the hotel.
One hotel employee did reportedly urge the union group to stay their meeting room behind closed doors, although their rental agreement had included use of a surrounding area. The SEIU group declined to sequester themselves.
Similar olive shirts have been seen at other Trump events, including in Alaska.
No one seems to have identified their organization.
Can you?