National security expert blames Republican officials for stirring up rage that's led to attacks on FBI
The FBI has opened a new department to handle threats against its own agents that have ramped up as Republicans in Congress and personalities on conservative TV draw parallels between the agency and Trump's prosecution and the Hunter Biden investigation, according to a report.
NBC's Ken Dilanian wrote on Thursday that FBI agents have been particularly swatted by individuals miffed over the lack of a prosecution of Biden. He was indicted on Thursday.
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace showed several clips of Republicans including Sen. Ron Johnson (WI) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (IA) making allegations on Fox about U.S. attorneys and others.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok lambasted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for ignoring FBI agents informing him about the threats as a result of the claims.
"When the FBI was prosecuting Al Capone, there wasn't a unit dedicated to protecting FBI personnel," he said. "You threw up that quote from testimony from an FBI agent to the House Judiciary Committee. Who's the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan hearing these threats. He nevertheless goes on television and, in the little snips that you show, he's repeating the name of this [Assistant US Attorney].
"Congressmen and Senators don't care about this threat. We need to be doing more. I'm glad to see the FBI and Director Wray and others talking about this."
"This is predictable," Strzok continued. "It's been brewing for some time. It's terrible to see. Going back into the Trump administration there were many of us who were the subject of these threats. I mean, we see this information coming out of the Justice Department, but I have a simple question: of all these threats and this new entire unit that according to Director [Christopher] Wray he had to set up, of all these threats how many are coming from anyone associated with left-wing causes?
"It's people upset the FBI isn't investigating Hunter Biden enough, and they're upset Donald Trump is being prosecuted or the people around Donald Trump or the Proud Boys or the Oath Keeper, they're concerned about that," Strzok explained. "Let's be brave enough to take a stand and say, where are the threats coming from?"
Mary McCord, former acting assistant attorney general for national security at the U.S. Department of Justice, similarly cited the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul by a conspiracy theorist in the couple's home.
"These are people motivated by others who are lying about things, right?" she explained. "Others who are stoking up and inciting violence and, by and large, those others go scot-free. We lack not only criminal mechanisms for holding people accountable who are really responsible for providing the narrative -- the false narrative that those who will act on that narrative, about on that narrative through threats and actual violence, we lack the right criminal tools to hold those people accountable."
She explained that there are also no civil tools, other than defamation.
"There's limits to what defamation can do too," she said. "You have to have a named person you're defaming. When you broadly say the Department of Justice is weaponized and the FBI is weaponized, that's not going to be specific enough to use some of these tools."
"I think it shows how extreme people are that they're taking it upon themselves to threaten the FBI," former prosecutor Harry Litman said. "That would be the last agency I would try to threaten. They're staking this claim that, look, you are endangering people. Do you want to go that route? Of course, the answer is going to be, yeah, we don't care. We will go that route."
See the conversation in the videos below or at the link here.
Part 1:
Part 2:
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