1/ White House officials refused requests by the Department of Homeland Security for more than a year to make combating domestic terror a greater priority. While the National Strategy for Counterterrorism, issued last fall, stated that "Radical Islamist terrorists remain the primary transnational terrorist threat to the United States and its vital national interests," it included one paragraph about domestic terrorism and made no mention of white supremacists and. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in July that there have been almost as many domestic terror arrests in the last nine months – about 100 – as there have been arrests connected to international terror. Wray also noted that most of the domestic terrorism cases were motivated by white supremacist violence. (CNN)
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has sued the Trump administration for what he calls his “unlawful” termination, arguing that his firing last year was the result of improper political interference by the president.
“It was Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him,” the complaint alleges.
…
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions dismissed McCabe in March 2018, only hours before his 50th birthday, when his full law enforcement pension would have vested. McCabe’s filing argues that he is “entitled to his full law enforcement pension and all other benefits, privileges, and rights currently being withheld.”
In explaining the firing in April 2018, the Justice Department cited a "lack of candor"in McCabe’s interviews with investigators looking into a 2016 media leak in the waning weeks of the presidential campaign.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the leak about investigations into Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation advanced McCabe’s "personal interests" at the expense of Justice leadership.
McCabe has said those allegations were a pretext to get rid of him after months of abuse from President Trump, who had singled him out as a political scapegoat in the 2016 campaign. After McCabe’s dismissal, Trump wrote on Twitter that it was a “great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI.”
To McCabe, the termination 26 hours before his scheduled retirement had everything to do with his role in protecting the investigation into Russian election interference in 2016.
None of the 8 victims in the hospital Trump visited in El Paso would see him. So he found one who couldn’t say no, an infant who lost BOTH parents and became an orphan that day along with two siblings, and had the child brought BACK to the hospital for a photo op with him grinning and giving a thumbs up. Wow.
“What kind of psychopath poses with an infant whose parents were killed”
Walmart pulls violent video game displays from its stores, but it will still sell guns
So I looked at Marcy Wheeler’s Emptywheel.net and she highlights this Betsy Woodruff scoop from the Daily Beast saying that the NCTC is focusing some efforts on Domestic Terrorism, which is a good thing and supports the FBI director Wray’s comments on where the current threats are - ditto Domestic Terrorism.
Thought I’d post this and MW’s explanation as well from Emptywheel. Again, Marcy is an analyst of these issues and I trust her thoughtful approach. Take a look.
By the summer of 2018, the lawyers concluded that NCTC could use its considerable resources to analyze purely domestic threats, as long as it did so to help the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). NCTC officials shared that view with senior officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that oversees the NCTC, and they didn’t get any pushback, per the official. Then the battleship started to turn—just a tad.
In the year since then, the official said, analysts in an NCTC entity that focuses on the radicalization and mobilization of potential foreign terrorists have been working on matters related to domestic terrorism.
NCTC officials have also begun setting up “a small element” in the Center’s Directorate of Intelligence focused on the domestic terror threat, the official said. The official noted that these efforts are not large-scale, and that they have had “to beg and borrow from different areas” to corral resources for the new domestic terrorism work.
To be sure, there’s a nomenclature problem when it comes to domestic and international terrorism, as hateful ideology can cross-pollinate between the U.S. and other countries. For instance, the New Zealander who murdered 51 people at two mosques cited American white supremacist Dylann Roof as an inspiration. Then the terrorist who allegedly murdered a worshiper at a synagogue in Poway, California cited the Christchurch shooter. When it comes to hate, Western nations have open borders.
Just to note that the person who carried out that atrocity is not a New Zealander but an Australian. He came over “the ditch” (Tasman Sea) to carry out his evil because it was easier to obtain the weapons he needed in New Zealand than in Australia. New Zealand has now strengthened its gun laws and we are in the process of buying back military style semi-automatic weapons from private ownership.
