Donald Trump Followers Targeted by FBI as 2024 Election Nears
My Newsweek article that was ignored by the liberal press
Last week, I reported at Newsweek about the FBI shifting its attention from January 6 and white supremacists to Trump supporters, both formally in its categorization and in terms of its concerns about violence in the 2024 elections.
The article went viral with conservatives and Trump supporters — check out my suprise appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room morning show — but was ignored by the “liberal” mainstream, that is, except for some Washington Post fact-checking take down that was silly (they didn’t bother to contact me).
Read for yourself:
The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.
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.
"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.
Read the rest at Newsweek.
The FBI has had situations over the years with no-win possible outcomes. Wiener wrote about it in Enemies: History of the FBI.