WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump will meet with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray in Washington Monday to discuss the fatal weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump may speak publicly about the nation's response, Sessions said.
"There is no bigger case right now that we are working on. Every resource will be dedicated to it," Sessions said on CBS. "I will be asking that we do that kind of thing today."
Sessions gave a series of interviews on morning shows Monday to address Trump's response to the clashes between white supremacists and counter-protesters, as well as the Department of Justice's plans to investigate a car attack that left one anti-racism demonstrator dead. Trump faced an uproar over the weekend from lawmakers in both parties and many civil rights groups after failing to personally denounce white nationalists, neo-Nazis and others who held the rally.
The president condemns "all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred, and of course that includes white Supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups," the White House said in a statement Sunday.
Though Trump has been publicly critical of Sessions in recent weeks, the attorney general defended the president's response to the weekend's violence.
"He explicitly condemned the kind of ideology behind these movements of Nazism, white supremacy, the KKK. That is his unequivocal position," Sessions said on ABC. "I think you'll hear that again today."
"His initial statement roundly and unequivocally condemned hatred and violence and bigotry," Sessions said. "He called on our people to work together in community and love and affection, not hatred and violence."
White-supremacists groups, which gathered in the Virginia college town to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, clashed with opponents of the rally on Saturday, leading to more than a dozen injuries and the death of one counter-protester in the car attack. Two Virginia State Police pilots assisting with the policing of the rally also died Saturday when their helicopter crashed.
Sessions said Saturday that the Justice Department had opened a civil-rights investigation into the car attack, after members of Congress urged him to probe the incident as an act of domestic terrorism.
"It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute," Sessions said. "You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation for the most serious charges that can be brought."
Both Democrats and Republicans said over the weekend that Trump missed a chance to unite the country with his remarks on Saturday, in which he condemned "hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides" but failed to specifically call out the white-nationalist groups behind the weekend's violence.
"He missed an opportunity to be very explicit here," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told Fox News on Sunday. "These groups seem to believe they have a friend in Donald Trump in the White House."
Vice President Mike Pence offered a more forceful condemnation of white supremacists on Sunday. "We have no tolerance for hate and violence from white supremacists, neo Nazis or the KKK," Pence said during a news conference in Colombia.
The violence also sparked condemnation internationally.
"These were repulsive scenes" of racism, anti-Semitism and hate, said a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
She and the entire German government express solidarity "with those who take a peaceful stand against such aggressive right-wing extremist stances," said the spokesman, Steffen Seibert, at a briefing in Berlin.
