A 12-foot statue depicted by President Trump holding hands with convicted trafficker Jeffrey Epstein at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., appeared Tuesday morning and was removed by the National Park Service less than 24 hours later.
Saga, which played a round on TV this week, didn’t stop there.
On Thursday, the group responsible for creating the statue — an anonymous group of “satirical activists” called secret handshakes — said the National Park Service had refused permission for a second time to reinstall the controversial statue.
“The statue was removed because it was not compliant with the license issued,” Interior Ministry spokesman Elizabeth Peace said Wednesday, citing the height contradiction.
The spray-painted bronze and the statue entitled “Best Friends Forever” were removed at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, said Carol Fresher, a DC-based location manager who was contracted with a secret handshake to obtain proper permission for the statue.
That’s the job Flasher says she’s been doing it for film and television throughout her 40-year career, and she says she has never seen the approved exhibits removed at the National Mall. If there is a problem with permission, the NPS will need to notify the applicant 24 hours a day to correct the error before taking any action. The notice was not given, Fleischer said.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve never been rejected,” Flasher said. “I’ve never been thrown out of property. I’ve never heard of anything like that. And they did it at 5:30am. …Why did they do that?”
Around noon on Wednesday, Flasher says he applied for a new permit for a “demonstration.” That type of permit usually has a 24-hour turnaround, and Flasher says NPS employees told her they would get new permission for that time frame.
While Flashir was about to obtain a second permit, members of the secret handshake were working to retrieve their art.
The statue was not treated kindly at the time of removal, the person in charge said from a secret handshake. The statue had broken head and knees in half in several parts. The group spent several hours repairing, rebuilding, repairing, rebuilding, and “glue” the “glue”. “To be honest, it looks pretty cool. It’s kind of messed up, but in an interesting way.”
The Times reviewed the video that the group’s security filmed. This indicates that workers will defeat and delete the statue in the dark.
“Free speech. Trump goes, there’s Epstein,” a passerby can say. “Taxpayer dollars.”
Throughout Thursday, a secret handshake official said, “We were told that (of the permit) was approved, approved and approved.”
Flasher called after noon and was informed that no permit had been issued, but whom she spoke to didn’t know why. An hour later she tried again, but this time she was told, “No, no permits will be issued,” she says. She pushed back and asked who she could talk to, but no one would talk to her.
“Absolute silence. No one called me anything. There’s no answer. There’s no permission. There’s no reason,” Flisher said. “No one’s talking, so it must have come from a very high place.”
The NPS has yet to respond to requests for comment on why the new permission was denied or why a secret handshake was not notified for 24 hours before the statue was first removed.
The secret handshake officials are responsible for four other political satires at the National Mall, including “Poop Desk,” which includes “poop,” featuring a pile of poop on the desk of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Officials said the group has hired security to protect work at the mall, as required by the permit, and is preparing security to come into effect Thursday afternoon and statues will be installed for a second time.
“They filmed the video… And if they decided to put it anyway, they did the video… And they’re ready to prepare an amount of unmarked cars, park service cars, city police, huge trucks. “We had at least 10 vehicles.”
The question of whether or not they are allowed to trade statues is in the midst of a fierce debate about freedom of speech in America, kicked off by the suspension of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”. After the comedian placed emphasis on the murder of Charlie Kirk.
