Two attendees of the Bronx Community Board 11 meeting, including the board’s chairman and district manager, say that military veterans Silvio Mazzella and Anthony Vitaliano walked out of a private meeting with Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ocasio-Cortez reportedly held a closed-door meeting with her constituency in the Bronx Wednesday, when two military veterans allegedly walked out on account of the congresswoman’s anti-American rhetoric.
Bronx Community Board 11 Chairmen Albert D’Angelo, who attended the private event, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that he saw Marine Corps veteran Silvio Mazzella, 74, and Army veteran Anthony Vitaliano, 78, leave during the meeting with Ocasio-Cortez.
“First Tony left quietly. Shortly after, Silvio left,” he recounted.
Ocasio-Cortez’s communications director, Corbin Trent, told The New York Post that only one person left while the meeting was still going on.
“The only person that left the meeting while it was underway was someone who had to go pick up their children,” Trent reportedly said.
Mazzela, treasurer of Community Board 11, told the New York Post that he left the meeting because, “She knocks the country, she knocks the president. And that’s not what America is about.”
Vitaliano, who worked for the NYPD for nearly 40 years, told the New York Post, “I just couldn’t hear her BS anymore. I just got up, got my umbrella in my hand and walked right out.”
Meeting attendee Jeremy Warneke, also a military veteran who served in Iraq and now serves as the board’s district manager, said that he had to leave the meeting partway through due to “a family obligation.”
U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) listens during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the “Trump Administration’s Response to the Drug Crisis-Part II” on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 9, 2019. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Warneke confirmed that there were a total of 19 people in the room during the meeting, including Ocasio-Cortez and one of her staff members. Of the 19 attendees, a total of four left partway through the meeting; Warneke, Mazzella, Vitaliano, and one man who left because he had to “pick up his children,” according to Warneke. (RELATED: AOC Talks About What It’s REALLY Like To Be So Popular)
Warneke noted that Mazzella and Vitaliano both left the meeting very discretely.
“People didn’t even know they left,” Warneke said.
TheDCNF reached out to Trent for a statement concerning how many people exited the meeting while it was still underway, but did not get a response.
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