Trump allies say FBI failed to stop New Orleans attack due to focus on white supremacy
In the aftermath of the ISIS-inspired terror attack committed by a man who plowed his truck through a crowd of New Year’s Eve revelers and killed 14 people in New Orleans, some of Donald Trump’s allies have suggested the FBI failed to prevent the attack because the agency was too focused on white supremacist investigations.
The criticism leveled at the FBI by Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has received an appointment to serve as ambassador to Greece, and Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, on Jan. 2 compounds a series of social media posts by the president-elect suggesting that lax security at the border enabled the attack. The rhetoric by the president-elect and his allies ignored the fact that the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran who lived in Houston.
Guilfoyle piled onto the president-elect’s rhetorical conflation of Islamic extremism with unauthorized border crossings, where no such connection exists, in a commentary opening her show on the streaming video platform Rumble one day after the attack.
“This terror attack follows years of Joe Biden’s open border, allowing countless terrorists to flood across our border,” Guilfoyle said. “This is a scary reminder that the threat of Islamic terrorism is active. But DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorcas thinks the problem is white supremacy.
“It’s fun to mock and laugh at woke politics, but the consequences of liberal lunacy can be deadly,” she added.
Bannon, for his part, said on the Jan. 2 edition of his “War Room” podcast devoted to the New Orleans attack: “One of the issues is that the apparatus thinks that the MAGA base is the problem. They think their collection of radicalized white nationalists, white separatists — I don’t know what they’ve concocted — but that’s the problem [FBI Director Christopher] Wray’s been focused on.”
The FBI did not respond to a request to comment on this story.
Elizabeth Neumann, who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, told Raw Story that Guilfoyle and Bannon’s conclusions about the New Orleans attack ignore the data on terrorist acts committed on U.S. soil and what researchers know about what is most effective in disrupting terror attacks.
“I’m not seeing an FBI that is ignoring the threat,” she said. “I’m seeing an FBI that has caught up to the fact that we also have threats from domestic violent extremists, which include white supremacists and anti-government extremists. They are the most lethal of the bunch.”
Guilfoyle and Bannon both turned to critics of the FBI to unpack the circumstances surrounding the New Orleans attack.
Guilfoyle interviewed Kyle Seraphin, a former special agent suspended from the agency. Seraphin revealed an internal FBI memo that provided the basis for a congressional report by House Republicans accusing the agency of abusing its authority to target Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.
Seraphin told Guilfoyle that, in his view, the FBI “got upside down” by “putting political priorities on your intelligence gathering — when you say white supremacy is the biggest threat to the homeland, and you start ignoring the real danger that we used to know about, starting on September 12th of 2001, which is called international terrorism.
“They got ahead of their skis, and they went after the convenience, and they forgot to go after the real thing, which has caused a lot of damage; it’s killed far more people in the last 25 years in America. Right?” Seraphin said. “It’s the reason we went to war and were there for two decades. And they let all these people in and they allowed something to happen that had no business happening in the first place, because they got their eye off the ball and they politicized intelligence collection.”
Seraphin’s claim that Islamic extremists are responsible for the highest number of fatalities in the past 25 years is correct, considering the catastrophic Sept. 11, 2001 attack that took 2,980 lives, not counting the attackers. But jihadi-inspired terrorism peaked in 2016 with the Pulse Nightclub shooting, while white supremacist attacks steadily increased from 2012 through 2019 and have remained a persistent challenge. (Another aspect of his statement is contradicted by the fact that the U.S. government did not “let in” Shabbar, who is a citizen.)
Prior to Shabbar’s attack, there hadn’t been a lethal Islamic extremist attack on U.S. soil since 2019, Jon Lewis, a researcher at the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, confirmed. In December 2019, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force studying at Naval Air Station Pensacola, fatally shot three U.S. sailors at the base.
Seraphin responded to a request for an interview by commenting on X about Raw Story’s efforts to reach him. He proposed doing an interview in an X thread or on a publicly streamed X space. Raw Story declined to agree to the interview under Seraphin's conditions.
On his show, Bannon interviewed retired Army Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a senior aide to former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman and later ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Under Nunes’ leadership, the Republicans on the committee aggressively challenged the FBI’s 2016 investigation into potential linkages between the Trump campaign and Russia. Nunes brought on Kash Patel to investigate the matter on behalf of the committee. Now, Patel is set to assume leadership of the FBI.
Echoing Seraphin’s criticism, Harvey told Bannon: “When you look at what the FBI and the [intelligence community] have been doing, they’ve been focused on the wrong targets.
Harvey suggested the FBI should be focusing on the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that President-elect Trump unsuccessfully sought to designate as a foreign terrorist organization during his first administration.
“And we’ve got sophisticated networks coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, financed by Qatar and other outside entities, influencing mosques, recruiting and placing imams that are denying the legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution and indoctrinating people into hating the U.S. Constitution and America,” Harvey said.
Harvey did not present any evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has helped facilitate any terror attacks on U.S. soil or is actively planning any attacks, and he could not be reached for comment for this story.
“The rampant disinformation and false narratives in the aftermath of the New Orleans attack are part of continued, broader efforts to stoke anti-immigrant hatred and promote anti-government conspiracies which undermine the legitimacy of the FBI,” Lewis, the research fellow at Project on Extremism, said in an email to Raw Story. “These claims — that the suspect had recently crossed the border, or that the FBI was hiding evidence and ‘lied about it to the world’ — are dangerous and have repeatedly served as inspiration for lone actors seeking justification to commit acts of violence.”
Neumann, the former Department of Homeland Security official, told Raw Story that Guilfoyle and Bannon’s commentary appears to be calculated to advance a specific political agenda.
“They’re trying to prepare the case for Trump to do drastic actions at the border and implement the third version of the travel ban,” she said. “They need to say scary people are coming across the border.”
Those who have carried out significant jihadi-inspired terror attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, have come from a range of backgrounds, from citizens to immigrants who were lawfully present in the United States.
The travel ban ordered by Trump when he took office in early 2017 likely stemmed from an ISIS-inspired terror attack carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a couple who opened fire and killed 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif. in December 2015.
Farook was an American citizen of Pakistani descent, while his wife was a green card holder from Pakistan who had lived in Saudi Arabia. In response to the attack, Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representative can figure out what the hell is going on.”
In 2017, Farook’s sister-in-law pleaded guilty to federal immigration fraud charges related to a sham marriage with a man who would later admit to conspiring with Farook to plan two earlier terror attacks that were not ultimately carried out.
Prior to the San Bernardino attack, the deadliest jihadi-inspired attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, was carried out by Nidal Hassan, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army major. Hassan opened fire at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood in Texas and killed 13 soldiers in November 2009.
Tamerlan and Dzokar Tsarnaev, the brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon attack in 2013 while reportedly obtaining bomb-making instructions from an online magazine published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, were both born in the Russian republic of Dagestan.
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who shot dead four Marines at military recruiting centers in Chattanooga, Tenn. in July 2015 and was also believed to have been inspired by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was born in Kuwait and moved to the United States with his family as an infant.
Esteban Santiago, who killed five people in a shooting at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on behalf of ISIS, is an American citizen who was born in New Jersey.
Sayfullo Saipov, who killed eight people in an ISIS-inspired vehicular attack in New York City in October 2017, is an Uzbeki national who had emigrated to the United States seven years earlier and became a legal permanent resident.
Trump’s original travel ban, issued in March 2017, targeted Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, but Pakistan, Russia, Kuwait or Tajikistan were not on the list.
Most of the Islamic extremist attacks carried out in the 2010s fell under the FBI’s “homegrown violent extremists” rubric, which is distinct from the “domestic violent extremists” framework that includes white supremacist, anti-government and anarchist extremist threats monitored by the FBI.
Seraphin argued on Guilfoyle’s show that FBI leaders embraced the “domestic violent extremist” framework because they ran out of jihadis to investigate.
“Once you run out of HVEs, you’re already looking within your own house for terrorism,” Seraphin said. “And they still had to justify this budget. And it’s my belief that that’s when they pivoted from HVE to DVE. Those are domestic violent extremists. Those are you and me. Those are MAGA people. Those are anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremists. It’s the fake white supremacy threat that’s always out there.”
Seraphin didn’t mention that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security started to take notice of white supremacist terrorism during the first Trump administration.
“It’s not like it was the Biden administration that pivoted,” Neumann told Raw Story. “It was a counterterrorism aha moment. I have said that it was too late…. We had this aha moment in 2018 and 2019. It was the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, and then we had El Paso. We were grappling with this as a community for over a year. We realized we had a big problem.”
Robert Gregory Bowers, who fatally shot 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, had complained on social media prior to the attack that a nonprofit called Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.”
He said: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
In March 2019, an Australian national named Brenton Tarrant fatally shot 51 Muslim worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, leaving behind a manifesto that promoted the white supremacist conspiracy theory known as “Great Replacement.”
The Christchurch massacre and “Great Replacement” were cited as an inspiration by Patrick Crusius, who drove more than 650 miles to carry out a mass shooting at Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people in August 2019. Crusius said in his own manifesto that he was concerned about a “Hispanic invasion.”
More than two years later, Payton Gendron would also cite Christchurch and “Great Replacement” as inspiration when he fatally shot 10 Black people at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y. In a diary detailing planning for the attack, Gendron revealed that he selected the target based on the ZIP code that had the highest concentration of Black people proximate to where he lived.
Neumann’s assessment of the evolving nature of the threat of terrorism was shared by her former boss, Chad Wolfe, who served as acting secretary of homeland security at the end of the first Trump administration.
In a Homeland Threat Assessment released in October 2020, Wolfe declared that “domestic violent extremism is a threat to the homeland.” He added that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.”
While the FBI has recalibrated to meet the threat posed by white supremacists, Lewis said it’s not as though the agency ever stopped investigating Islamic extremists.
“In reality, counterterrorism is not and cannot be an either-or proposition,” he said. Lewis said 10 ISIS supporters were arrested in the United States last year, and the FBI has “made it clear that ISIS is an enduring homegrown threat,” adding that “law enforcement is more than capable of fighting numerous forms of violent extremism simultaneously.”
Regardless of whether it’s white supremacy or radical Islam, Neumann said if law enforcement is only focused on ideology, they’ll miss the opportunity to disrupt terror plots.
“Whether you’re inspired by ISIS or inspired by a militia or antifa, the underlying psycho-social factors of potential perpetrators show a lot of similarities,” Neumann said. Noting the commonalities of factors such as job loss, divorce and addiction among terrorists, she said that the motivation for terrorism often “boils down to loss of significance and belonging.”
While it’s “quite frightening” to witness the first jihadi-inspired attack in five years, Neumann said, “If we want to stop this, we have to focus on what all the research tells us — that we need to build the capability for bystanders to recognize there are concerning signs and get that person into appropriate care and treatment.”
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