White House says President Donald Trump raising 'questions that need to be asked'

The White House on Wednesday said U.S. President Donald Trump was raising

“questions that need to be asked” when he shared an unfounded conspiracy theory suggesting that an older protester who police pushed to the ground last week in Buffalo, New York, could have been an anti-fascist “provocateur” trying to disrupt police communications.

“In every case we can’t jump on one side without looking at all the facts at play,”

White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told the “Fox & Friends” show.

She said 75-year-old Martin Gugino, who remains hospitalized with a concussion, had made “some very questionable tweets, some profanity-laden tweets about police officers."

“Of course, no one condones any sort of violence,” she said. “We need the appropriate amount of force used in any interaction,” while adding, “There are a lot of questions in that case.”

She noted that after two police officers, Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe, were charged with assaulting Gugino, 57 of their colleagues on the Buffalo police department’s Emergency Response Team resigned from the unit in a show of support for them.

“So I think we need to ask why those police officers resigned, what happened, what facts were on the ground and the president was just raising some of those

questions,” McEnany said.

Gugino was knocked to the ground after he approached police trying to clear a

Buffalo street of demonstrators last Friday who were protesting against the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man who died in Minneapolis, Minnesota, while in police custody. The policeman, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with second-degree murder in the incident involving Floyd's death.