Vienna Police Call Vigil At Senator's Home A 'Minor Event'

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — Local police are dismissing claims by Missouri U.S. Senator Josh Hawley that his wife and daughter were terrorized by what he called “Antifa scumbags” during. protest outside the legislator’s Fairfax County home earlier this week.

In an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday, Vienna Police spokesman Juan Vazquez called the incident a “minor event” and said that demonstrators who were outside Hawley’s home on Monday left shortly after were asked to and did not vandalize the residence as Hawley claimed in a series of tweets Monday night.

Hawley, who was the first Republican to say that he would challenge the certification of Electoral College votes this week, made the characterization of protesters outside his home on Twitter, taking exception to the presence of activists outside of his residence while he was back in Missouri.

Shutdown DC said that it had about a dozen activists outside of Hawley’s Vienna home to demand that Hawley drop his “baseless contestation of the 2020 presidential election results.”

After Hawley said in a social media post that “Antifa scumbags” screamed threats, vandalized his home and tried to pound open our door, Vazquez said the incident did not rise to that level.

“It was a minor event,” Vazquez told the AP. “Basically, we got a call saying there was some sort of protest in front of a residence in our town … The group was maybe 15 to 20 people.”

Vazquez said earlier this week that the protesters were informed of the violations that they could be charged with and left about eight minutes after police arrived. Police said they were called to the residence around 7:45 p.m. on Monday, when Hawley said the group had arrived and was terrorizing his wife while the senator was in Missouri.

Virginia law prohibits protesters from gathering outside a private home, Vazquez told the AP and said the group also violated local noise ordinances as well as ordinances that prohibit people writing on a public sidewalk with chalk. A video posted by Shutdown DC of the nearly hour-long protest showed activists writing in chalk on the sidewalk but did not show any further damage to Hawley’s home. Vazquez told the AP that the chalk would be cleaned up by city workers.

Patrick Young, who organized Monday night’s protest outside Hawley’s home, also dismissed Hawley’s allegations earlier this week.

“Some people wrote messages to him in sidewalk chalk on the public sidewalk in front of his house. The same kind of chalk kids use to play hopscotch,” said Young, who works as a research analyst for a nonprofit, the AP reported.

“People should pay attention to the way that he’s lying about what happened last night. Because he’s lying the exactly the same way when he talks about the election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia,” Young said. “This shows his causal relationship with reality.”