Trump's latest rant urging CIA to act inside U.S. triggers legal fears
President-elect Donald Trump, in an angry midnight rant, criticized the United States on multiple fronts and called for the Central Intelligence Agency, a U.S. civilian foreign intelligence entity, to conduct investigations within the United States — a move potentially unlawful and a possible threat to Americans’ civil rights.
Hours later, he appeared to directly blame President Joe Biden for the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, currently under FBI investigation as an act of terrorism.
Declaring America a “disaster,” and a “laughing stock all over the World,” Trump, early Thursday morning, alleged the U.S. has “open borders,” and “weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”
He also claimed the “DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors” are “incompetent and corrupt” and “have not done their job,” but rather, “spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself.”
“Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country,” Trump declared, never specifying what he was railing against, before calling for the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate.
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“The CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late. The USA is breaking down – A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th,” Trump announced, referring to his upcoming inauguration, before closing with his slogan.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, pointing to Trump’s Truth Social post, reported that the President-elect “again seems to connect the attack in New Orleans to the border.”
The suspect in that attack is a 42-year-old American from Texas, a U.S. military veteran, who is believed to have plowed a pickup truck into people celebrating on historic Bourbon Street in New Orleans early on New Years’ Day, killing 14 or 15 people, and injuring many others. The attack is being investigated by the FBI as an act of terrorism, according to multiple reports.
“The FBI said the suspect, who was killed in a firefight with officers, had an ISIS flag in the vehicle at the time of the attack,” CNN reported.
Despite the suspect being an American and a veteran, Trump had implied the attack had been carried out by an undocumented immigrant.
“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump had claimed Wednesday.
“The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”
Reporting that Trump had “shared anti-immigrant misinformation moments after an inaccurate report from Fox News,” HuffPost notes that “Fox News had reported minutes prior to Trump’s Truth Social post that the vehicle used by the suspect had crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico two days before the attack. Just over an hour later, the conservative network retracted that reporting, saying its sources had advised that the truck crossed the border on Nov. 16 apparently driven by someone else. Later in the afternoon, it reported that the truck never crossed over from Mexico.”
As Raw Story reported Wednesday afternoon, Fox News delivered an on-air fact check of Trump’s remarks.
“Now the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in a statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear,” Fox News justice correspondent David Spunt told viewers (video below), “the suspect was born in the United States, he served in the United States Army, he was a veteran, the FBI is the lead agency in this investigation going through the social media and any other accounts associated with the suspect.”
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Later Thursday morning, Trump doubled down, this time directly attacking President Joe Biden.
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA,” Trump posted to his Truth Social account.
In 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA, “directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration.”
“Under the 1947 act setting up the C.I.A., the agency was forbidden to have ‘police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal security functions’ inside the United States. Those responsibilities fall to the F.B.I., which maintains a special internal security unit to deal with foreign intelligence threats,” The Times had reported.