(Republicaninformer.com)- As Governor Dewine was set to speak at an Ohio presser, News reporter Evan Lambert was doing a live spot with East Palestine when officials told him to stop.
DeWine was ready to provide an update on the tragic train crash that released dangerous chemicals in eastern Ohio the previous week. Police detained Lambert for criminal trespassing and disruptive behavior shortly after he went off-air.
DeWine said shortly after Lambert’s detention that the police were “wrong” to have detained him and that Lambert had “every right” to be there.
“I’m very, very sorry that happened,” DeWine said, saying, also, that he didn’t know all the details.
Lambert was let out of the Columbiana County Jail late on Wednesday night, about ten o’clock. He then went on NewsNation with Ashleigh Banfield to talk about the experience.
The reporter said he was just trying to perform his job. He said he was safeguarding the First Amendment, preserving democracy, and assisting in information access. He said he was discussing the disaster that affected hundreds of thousands of community members. “And that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to accomplish and what we were attempting to achieve at the time,” he said.
Inquiring further, Banfield reminded her colleague that “there was still a piece missing” to the story.
Lambert said that no journalist expects to get detained while doing their work. Lambert was careful in what he was willing to say, perhaps on the advice of legal counsel.
The journalist said that the Constitution protects his work that he is fortunate to be able to perform, and he will “keep doing it.”
“It definitely occurs more often, more often, in other nations that don’t have the liberties that we enjoy. And nothing like this circumstance will prevent me or my team from informing the public about what they need to know,” Lambert proclaimed.
“It has always been my practice that if I’m doing a press conference if someone wants to report out there and they wanna be talking to the people back on a channel or whatever, they have every right to do that,” Lambert said. “If someone was stopped or told they could not do that, that was wrong, and it was nothing I authorized. And certainly, that would be something I would not want to see happen,” he concluded.
