Bookstore owner calls police on woman accosting Steve Bannon
A Richmond, Virginia, bookstore owner called the police on a customer for verbally berating Steve Bannon.
Black Swan Books owner Nick Cooke told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that a woman in the store proceeded to call the former Trump adviser a “piece of trash.”
“Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business,” Cooke said. “I asked her to leave, and she wouldn’t. And I said, ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t,’ and I went to call the police and she left. And that’s the end of the story.”
Cooke defended his decision to place the call, which according to the Richmond Police Department he ended before officers responded.
“We are a bookshop,” he said. “Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions and not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening.”
Philippe Reines, once a top aide to Hillary Clinton, was criticized for tweeting out the book shop’s address, which was viewed as an implicit call to boycott or attack it.
I’m providing a service to the public by providing the contact information the bookstore posted on their website - presumably with the hope of being contacted. I presented facts w/o encouraging any behavior.
I’d point out through it’s possible this woman stopped a book burning. pic.twitter.com/ofDi2aA3tM— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) July 8, 2018
The incident is reminiscent of a Virginia restaurant asking White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave last month because some staff members took issue with President Donald Trump and his policies.
Both Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and senior White House adviser Stephen Miller were also both confronted at restaurants in relation to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
