Conservative journalist Nick Sortor was arrested after engaging with Antifa protesters in Portland, Oregon.
“This was as big of a surprise to me as it was to everybody else. All of a sudden, you know, I’m being jumped by Antifa thugs,” Sortor told Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin. “I get back up, I stumble away and go back toward cops where I think, you know, at least, all right, well, maybe that’ll be a safer place for me to go” but “never suspected that I was going to be the target of the arrest, that they were coming in to me.”
“And when they put me into handcuffs, the first thing that went to my mind wasn’t, ‘Oh, you’re being arrested.’ It’s, ‘Oh, they’re trying to help you and get you out of here and make it look like they’re doing something.’ Because they weren’t telling me what they were doing. They weren’t telling me I was under arrest,” Sortor claimed. “They weren’t telling me what I was being charged with. And it took over an hour for me to find out what I was charged with.”
Melugin later shared on social media that Sortor was charged with “disorderly conduct.”
Sortor announced that Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a full investigation into the matter. He explained that Bondi personally called him to deliver the news.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, as per Fox News, that the Trump administration has “directed his team here at the White House to begin reviewing aid that can potentially be cut in Portland.”
“Instead of arresting these violent mob members, night after night after night, who are ravaging this community, the police arrested a journalist who was there trying to document the chaos,” she added.
