Sharpton defiled the White House with his presence… again.

Via WaPo:

It started with the seating.

When the 33 invited participants to Wednesday’s “White House Convening on Building Community Trust” filed into the conference room in the cavernous and ornate Eisenhower Executive Office Building, they discovered they would be placed next to improbable seatmates.

Rashad Robinson, a black political activist, had Pittsburgh's police chief, Cameron McLay, on one side of him and Anaheim, Calif., Mayor Tom Tait on the other. Fraternal Order of Police Executive Director James O. Pasco was placed between NAACP President Cornell Brooks and Harvard University economics professor Roland Fryer, who just published an analysis on racial disparities in aspects of law enforcement.

It was diversity “by design,” as Obama later told reporters, an unorthodox, four-hour experiment in policymaking through the kind of emotional exchanges that are more often associated with therapeutic encounter sessions than bureaucratic seminars. And according to interviews with about a third of those who participated, it worked. […]

St. Paul, Minn., Mayor Chris Coleman, whose city has experienced some contentious rallies since a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile earlier this month in nearby Falcon Heights, called the actions of some protesters “disgraceful.” Mica Grimm, an activist with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis who was also in the room, took issue with the phrase; Coleman countered that some protesters had dropped concrete blocks on his city’s officers. [One officer had a broken vertebra.]

“I responded by telling him that the protests aren’t going to stop until we see actual change,” Grimm recalled later. “And that begins with seeing an officer held accountable for killing somebody.”

As Coleman and Grimm went back and forth, one of the other police chiefs in the room slipped a note of support to Grimm, and then the Rev. Al Sharpton interjected.

“We really need to be talking about why people are protesting instead of being upset with protesters,” said Sharpton, the longtime, and at times controversial, civil rights activist, redirecting the conversation.

HT: Newsbusters