President Trump accurately blamed “both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, which makes it a matter of theological importance to the Left that no responsibility attributed to leftists can enter the public’s consciousness.  A 222-page “independent report” about the August 12 violence in Charlottesville prepared by Tim Heaphy, a one-time Obama appointee and donor to the city’s Democrat mayor, was released this past week. It fails to even mention the advance warning to Virginia and Charlottesville officials by the Department of Homeland Security that antifa were preparing to make violent confrontations at the August 12 tragedy. One woman protestor and two police officers died, and there were many other injuries that day in Charlottesville.

The report is getting play in the press and social media for laying fault at the feet of state and city police for failing to takes prudent steps to prevent the violence that took place between white supremacists and others -- including antifa -- in competing protests at adjacent parks nestled within the city. The park protests were disbursed as “unlawful assemblies” after police looked the other way when violence had begun, and the overflow into the city’s streets became chaotic and ultimately deadly for one woman.

While the report does mention antifa 38 times, and “criticizes the city council and top city officials for a series of mistakes,” it is being used as fodder by the liberal press such as The New York Times to support the one-sided, misleading narrative they had already created: “White Supremacists Were Ready for Violence in Charlottesville. The Police Were Not.

Only the more conservative publications such as The Daily Caller have noted the report’s more balanced conclusions, such as “it was a counter-protester, not white nationalists, who started the parking garage fight at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in which a black man, Deandre Harris, was severely beaten.”

From the beginning of its reporting following the event, the liberal media whitewashed the DHS warning about antifa’s conspiring to engage in violence at the Charlottesville protests over planned removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue. The reasons are pretty obvious. For one, the warning helped confirm President Trump’s statements that both sides were responsible for the violence that day, and it was premeditated on the part of antifa.

The Heaphy report’s failure to inject the critical fact of the DHS warning will distort the historical and perhaps legal record. It also provides cover for Democrat politicians such as Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe who lied about Trump’s claim of violence from both sides, and even tried to blame the ACLU, but who should be neck-deep in the blame.