Chicago Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot defended her decision to appear at a large celebration for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden after last week’s election, saying the “crowd was gathered whether I was there or not.”
“One of the reasons people feel frustrated or skeptical is they’re getting a lot mixed messages,” MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle said. “What do you say to those who are criticizing you where less than a week ago you went out and stood before a massive crowd who was celebrating Joe Biden’s victory, and now you’re saying your city has to shut down? How do you have one and not the other?”
“Well, look, I think that we’ve been saying all along everybody has to take care, everybody has to take precaution,” Lightfoot responded. “I will tell you, in that big crowd a week ago, we had everybody was wearing masks. Look at, you can see the shot here – mask compliance in our city is actually up very, very high. But yes, there are times when we actually do need to have a relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times.”
“That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not,” she claimed. “But this has been a super hard year on everyone. Everyone feels traumatized. They feel threatened, their safety, and they don’t know what tomorrow’s gonna bring, and with this new surge in cases, we have just got to step up and do the right thing, and I think people understand that.”
“You know, we know a lot more … than what we knew back in the spring; we’ve got a lot more data,” she concluded. “We understand better on how this virus spreads. Back in the spring, when we issued these blanket stay-at-home orders, it was because we really didn’t understand where the risk was, so we were trying to mitigate it everywhere. We now have a lot more data, and we can use a surgeon’s knife and not just a blunt instrument to try to really go at where we’re seeing the biggest risk[s] and help mitigate them, and for us right now the biggest risk that we’re seeing in our city is in these private spaces and gatherings. So, we want to support our economy as best we can, but we’ve got to do the things that we know are necessary to save lives.”
WATCH:
.@chicagosmayor Lightfoot defends celebrating Biden’s Election Day in the streets despite her own rules against mass gatherings: "That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not." pic.twitter.com/MR81LnHfa7
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 13, 2020
The segment comes after a report on Thursday revealed that California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom “attended a multi-family birthday party for one of his political advisers last week that reportedly included over a dozen people, which goes against the types of gatherings that his administration has warned people about having,” The Daily Wire reported.
“The dinner the night of Nov. 6 at the famed French Laundry in Yountville in Napa County brought together at least 12 people to celebrate the 50th birthday of Jason Kinney, a longtime friend and political adviser to Newsom who is also a partner at the lobbying firm Axiom Advisors,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported. “State guidelines limit gatherings, defined as ‘social situations that bring together people from different households at the same time in a single space or place,’ to no more than three households. Representatives for Kinney and Newsom declined to specify how many households the diners represented, but did not dispute that it was more than three.”