Monday, May 03, 2021

FBI Caught Snooping Through NSA Records to Look for ‘Racially Motivated Violent Extremists’

BY ROBERT SPENCER | P J Media

AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

The Daily Beast reported last week that “The FBI, without any court order, sifted through the National Security Agency’s massive troves of foreign communications for information on American “racially motivated violent extremists,” even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court warned the FBI in 2018 that its warrant-free queries” were unconstitutional. The first question that springs to mind in connection with this is: to whom can we turn when those who are supposed to be protecting us have been thoroughly corrupted and weaponized against the American people? And the second question is: Why are “racially motivated violent extremists” so hard to find that the FBI has to do an illegal deep dive into NSA material to find them?

The FBI is trying to validate the narrative that Old Joe Biden’s handlers had him enunciate (which he did, remarkably, without getting tongue-tied or saying something incoherent) during his message to Congress. “’As I stand here tonight,” Biden intoned Wednesday, “just one day shy of the 100th day of my administration. 100 days since I took the oath of office, lifted my hand off our family Bible, and inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

The idea that the entry of a group of unarmed people into the U.S. Capitol constituted the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” was not just ridiculous (remember 9/11? Pearl Harbor?); it was insidious. Beyond the silliness and hysteria is an insidious agenda. Biden’s handlers mean to stigmatize, demonize and silence all dissent from their far-left agenda. Wildly exaggerating what happened on January 6, and the concomitant “white supremacist agenda,” is in service of that agenda.

And so the FBI goes fishing in material the NSA obtained without a warrant, trying to validate the left’s claims. And this has been a long time coming: Jana Winter reported in Yahoo News in February that “the U.S. government is acknowledging for the first time that right-wing extremists were responsible for the majority of fatal domestic terrorist attacks last year, according to an internal report circulated by the Department of Homeland Security last week.” But as you might expect, the actual report was long on vague assertions and decidedly short on facts.

Before that, FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed back in September 2017 that “white nationalist” violence was at least as much of a danger to the United States as the Islamic State. But now this claim is being codified as policy. Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies states of the new report: “What is a little unusual is that they’ve used terms like ‘right- and left-wing’ in a government document, because the government has generally used other terms. The government in 2020 did try to stay away from ‘right-wing’ terms because they were easily politicized.”

No kidding. And you’ll never guess who is responsible for the fact that this alarming surge in “right-wing” terrorism hasn’t been noted until now, according to Yahoo News: “The report also comes not long after the end of the Trump administration, which was criticized for downplaying right-wing violence. Former President Donald Trump, in particular, frequently referred to the threat from antifa, a loose movement of left-wing activists.” Yes, and we all know how peaceful and cuddly Antifa is.

Making it very clear what the point of this report was, Mike German, whom Yahoo News identifies as a “former FBI agent and now a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice,” explained: “There is a lot of overlap between white supremacists and far-right militias, and they often work together during the commission of violent acts, like at the attack on the Capitol.”

However, before you sign on to the idea that support for Donald Trump equals support for “insurrection” and the enabling of terrorism, note that, as Yahoo News points out, “the government has released no data on historical activity or the current threat landscape.” Apparently we’re just supposed to take their word for it.

Also conspicuously lacking in this report were definitions of the key terms. What does the government define as “right-wing”? What do they classify as “left-wing”? What do they define as a “terrorist attack”? The Joint Regional Intelligence Center report defines “terrorist incidents” as “violence motivated by political or religious conviction,” but offer no definitions of the other terms.

And now comes the revelation of the FBI’s dumpster-dive at the NSA. It is all part of the effort to portray peaceful, law-abiding Americans who supported President Trump and dissent from the leftist agenda as terrorists and as enablers of terrorism. And one certainty of the regime of Biden’s handlers is that there will be a great deal more of this.

Meanwhile, while our agencies purvey this propaganda, the global jihad proceeds apace.

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Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins―Revised and Expanded Edition. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/robert-spencer/2021/05/03/fbi-goes-hunting-for-racially-motivated-violent-extremists-n1444256?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=227841a8b1ca836b99e21ea36efa6859&recip=28551147