AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
The FBI’s new warnings about an increased risk of attacks on the United States after Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel may be too little too late following years in which the agency has been weaponized by the Biden administration to target conservatives while ignoring legitimate threats to the American people.
During the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference earlier this week, FBI Director Christopher Wray said there was “no question” that the agency is “seeing an increase in reported threats” following Hamas’s attack. “We have to be on the lookout, especially for lone actors who may take inspiration from recent events to commit violence of their own,” he continued.
Such warnings come, however, after Wray and his agency have focused on anything but foreign terror threats since Biden took office.
Biden has repeatedly declared that “white supremacy” is “the most dangerous terrorist threat” to the American homeland. In June 2021, the president unveiled a new plan completely reorienting the country’s entire counterterrorism approach away from foreign threats and toward supposed domestic threats.
“The plan highlights a shift in the U.S. approach to counterterrorism, which for decades focused on fighting foreign terrorists,” the New York Times reported. The administration would now treat “white supremacists and militia groups as top national security threats.”
But Biden’s FBI subsequently showed no real urgency to target actual white supremacists and militia groups. Instead, they went after ordinary Americans who simply disagreed with Biden politically.
In 2021, for instance, following Biden’s “reorientation” of their mission, the FBI’s counterterrorism division was busy labeling parents who spoke out at school board meetings with a “domestic terrorism threat tag.” A directive from Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland shows that the Department of Justice ordered the FBI to investigate parent protests outside of school board meetings throughout the country.
In September of last year, Biden’s FBI conducted a dawn raid on the home of Mark Houck, a pro-life activist and father of seven, over an alleged violation of the FACE Act for an incident outside of an abortion clinic in 2021. Despite the fact that Houck had no history of violence and was not a flight risk, a SWAT team of 25-30 armed agents arrived to cart him away in handcuffs. (A jury found Houck not guilty of all charges in January.)
Earlier this year, the FBI’s Richmond field office was also exposed for targeting so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as a supposed extremist threat. According to a memo which was also shared with local offices in several other cities, including Los Angeles and Portland, the FBI was considering “mitigation” tactics to address the threat. Those tactics included sending in agents to infiltrate churches and convince church leadership to report signs of “violent extremism” to the FBI.
A report earlier this month from Newsweek also alleges that the FBI “has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.”
Notably, however, neither the FBI nor any other federal law enforcement agency has offered any indication that they are looking into the organizers and funders of the appalling pro-Hamas rallies that have swept through major American cities in recent days, even as they warn about an increased likelihood of attacks. While these protestors openly celebrate terrorist attacks that killed American citizens, the FBI is busy investigating the supporters of a former duly-elected president.
The FBI’s obsession with combatting so-called “domestic extremism” is eerily reminiscent of the situation leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Throughout the 1990s, the FBI was also preoccupied with targeting “home-grown” right-wing extremists, even as radical Islamic jihadists infiltrated the country and planned the 9/11 attacks. Just 6 percent of the FBI’s agents were committed to counterterrorism operations in 2001. Despite FBI officials testifying that they were “95 to 98 percent sure” that an attack was coming, there was no concerted effort to focus in on the threat, even after numerous terrorist attacks on American targets abroad.
Yet even as the FBI is once again preoccupied with “domestic terrorism,” the threat from foreign terrorists has continued to grow – primarily as a result of Joe Biden’s appeasement of the world’s top sponsor of terror, Iran, along with the disaster at the southern border.
In total, 151 people on the U.S. terrorism watchlist were apprehended trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in FY 2023. That figure surpassed the previous record of 98 set in FY 2022 – and those are just the ones caught by border patrol who happened to be on the watchlist.
There’s no telling how many potential terrorists could be among the millions of foreign nationals who have infiltrated our borders since Biden took office. Hamas’s attacks on Israel were reportedly planned over a period of years.
It’s now vital that we ask, what, if anything, the FBI and other government agencies are doing to track down the potential jihadists plotting similar acts of terror here. Given the intelligence failures in Israel, how confident can we be that another 9/11 isn’t being planned right now? How are resources being re-allocated to address this threat?
The American people deserve answers to these questions and many others. They also deserve accountability for the FBI’s dereliction of duty in recent years. God willing, it won’t take another tragedy to get it.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.
