Democratic lawmakers on the House Overside Committee sent a letter to the U.S. military on Friday requesting a report in an altercation earlier this week involving an Arlington National Cemetery employee and Trump associates who brought campaign photographers to the cemetery.
In the letter, the committee’s ranking member, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote to Defense Secretary Christine Wormuth that he “hopes you can provide the committee with a full account” of Monday’s incident.
Former President Donald Trump visited the cemetery to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to commemorate the third anniversary of the 2021 suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 service members during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The confrontation occurred when Trump’s campaign team took its own photographers into Section 60 of the cemetery, where veterans of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.
While exact details are still unclear, an Army spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News on Thursday that the employee was “suddenly sidelined” and called it “unfortunate” that the “employee and her professionalism were unfairly attacked.”
The cemetery said in a statement this week that “federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities at Army National Military Cemeteries, including photographers, content creators or other individuals present for purposes of or in direct support of the campaign of a partisan political candidate.”
In his letter, Raskin wrote that “it appears the Trump campaign has not complied with Arlington National Cemetery’s absolute prohibition,” citing Arlington’s guidelines that prohibit “filming for partisan, political or fundraising purposes” under the Hatch Act.
Defense officials previously told CBS News that some Trump campaign staffers behaved unprofessionally and were both verbally and physically aggressive toward the cemetery official.
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“ANC conducts nearly 3,000 such public ceremonies each year without incident,” the military spokesman said in the statement. “Participants in the August 26 ceremony and subsequent Section 60 visit were advised of federal law, military regulations and DoD policy, which clearly prohibit political activity at cemeteries.”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has maintained that it received express permission from the Gold Star families to bring “campaign-designated media.” Reports verified by CBS News confirm this claim.
A Trump campaign spokesperson also said there was “no physical confrontation as described and we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.”
Raskin also cited an apology from Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who attended the ceremony with Trump and posted several photos from the event on his official social media accounts.
“This was not a campaign event and was never intended to be used by the campaign,” Cox wrote in a social media post Wednesday. “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending an apology.”
Raskin called on the military to provide an “incident report” and a “briefing” and asked Wormuth to respond by September 9.
Scott MacFarlane, Kathryn Watson, Eleanor Watson,
And
contributed to this report.
