DCCC chair Maloney defends new hire who called Capitol Police 'white supremacists' after riot

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Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney defended Dyjuan Tatro, a former gang member who recently joined the DCCC, as an "extraordinary individual" after backlash to some of Tatro's anti-police tweets.

Tatro, the DCCC's newly hired senior adviser for strategic outreach referred to police officers as "white supremacists" after the storming of the Capitol in January and condoned looting in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

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"It's a pretty extraordinary individual you're talking about," Maloney said when asked about Tatro during a Politico interview on Wednesday. "You're talking about deleted tweets that were before we hired him."

One of the tweets that landed Tatro in hot water came just weeks before the DCCC announced his new role.

"The answer to white supremacists storming the Capitol is not to give more money to a different group of white supremacists who's [sic] job it is to uphold white supremacy," Tatro wrote in a now-deleted Twitter thread about the Capitol Police budget on Jan. 8. 

Craig Steven Wilder and Dyjuan Tatro speak on stage at the special screening of COLLEGE BEHIND BARS at The Apollo Theater on November 12, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Ben Gabbe/Getty Images for Skiff Mountain Films)

The DCCC announced Tatro's hiring in early February.

"The man you're mentioning, by the way, is the subejct of a Ken Burns documentary. ... The reason Ken Burns made a movie about him is because he turned his life around in prison and has been part of a bipartisan effort at criminal justice reform centered around particularly education in prison," Maloney told Politico.

Maloney used the opportunity to attack Republicans.

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"What you have on the other side is a bunch of racially-based attacks like the ones you're mentioning and repeating again that are designed to stir up America along racial lines for their short term politcial gain," he said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee hit back on Wednesday.

"By supporting his senior advisor's disgusting rhetoric, DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney confirmed Democrats' disdain for law enforcement is not only accepted, but encouraged," NRCC spokesman Michael McAdams told Fox News in a statement.

Tatro previously compared reforming police to reviving Nazism.

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"To all those people who want to reform the police because all cops aren't bad, should we just go ahead and revive Nazism because all Nazis weren't bad? I didn't think so. Case closed," he wrote in a now-deleted tweet in June.

In another post, Tatro characterized looting as "protests against systemic racism" in August.

"I don't understand why you can't CONDEMN VIOLENT POLICE [and] acknowledge LOOTING as a VITAL form of social PROTEST. And, how about YOU not use sterilized language when referring to state sanctioned murder while maligning protests against the systemic racism that enables it," Tatro responded to another user's tweet about calling for both police reform and condemnation of violence and looting.