The New York Post reports that two military veterans walked out of a private meeting with Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week after the freshman congresswoman began bashing US foreign policy. However, AOC's office claims the two men are lying.
“She knocks the country, she knocks the president. And that’s not what America is about,” Silvio Mazzella, a Vietnam War veteran and treasurer of Community Board 11, told the New York Post.
Another veteran, "Anthony Vitaliano — an Army veteran who worked in the NYPD for 38 years, and commanded the Bronx’s homicide detectives," was sitting right next to the congresswoman and her chief of staff as she made her remarks.
“I just couldn’t hear her BS anymore,” Vitaliano told the paper. “I just got up, got my umbrella in my hand and walked right out.”
After one board member asked about the conflict in Yemen, "The progressive firebrand slammed the US policy of providing bombs to Saudi Arabia, which has supported Yemen’s government in a brutal civil war, according to attendees. Some blamed her for not including the roles of other nations in explaining the volatile region’s violence," according to those who attended the meeting.
One anonymous attendee said he was "revolted," after AOC's calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald J. Trump "autocrats."
When asked about the walkouts, AOC's spokesman Corbin Trent claimed they never happened. “The only person that left the meeting while it was underway was someone who had to go pick up their children,” Trent told the NYP.
But Vitaliano responded saying, "That’s bulls–t. Everybody that was there knows I walked out.”