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Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that the FBI has officially designated Trump supporters as terrorists to get ready for the 2024 election.
The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.
And it isn’t just the people in her newsfeed. A growing chorus of security experts and politicians has cast the mob, or parts of it, in terms that are typically reserved for ISIS and Al Qaeda. Some commentators have even begun to call for a new American war on terror in response to the Capitol riot, one aimed at President Trump’s more radical supporters on the right.
“The FBI is in an almost impossible position,” says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.
Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.
On Wednesday morning, while presiding over Trump’s impeachment in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to the rioters as “domestic terrorists,” a phrase that President-elect Joe Biden has also used to describe them. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for them to be put on a “no-fly list” of terrorism suspects, a measure that the FBI said it was “actively looking at.” Even veterans of the Trump Administration have urged the government to unleash the tools of counterterrorism, honed in the two decades since 9/11, against the perpetrators of the Capitol assault, their supporters and their associates.
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