It's no secret why President Trump forced out FBI Director Christopher Wray, his choice for first term as the nation's law enforcement chief: Shortly after the January 6 insurrection, Wray said Congress that the Capitol siege was an act of “domestic terrorism.” And for the next four years, he oversaw the largest criminal investigation in American history to bring perpetrators to justice, including its instigator and cheerleader, Trump.
Even before January 6, Wray repeatedly warned Congress that the problem of “domestic violent extremists” (DVE, in office parlance) rivals or exceeds that of international terrorism. The threat “has been metastasizing across the country,” Wray testified in 2021, and “is not going away anytime soon.”
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Trump, on his day 1 general clemency for the January 6 “DVEs” has helped ensure that. As a result, we are all less safe.
The president will have an ally to excuse right-wing extremism if the Republican-controlled Senate confirms his choice to succeed Wray: provocateur Kash Patel, spreader of anti-FBI conspiracy theories and apologist for the January 6 rioters. . Patel's confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
For weeks, Trump's Republican allies have argued that his nominees for national security posts in his Cabinet (Patel and Pete Hegseth, confirmed Friday to be Pentagon chief, and Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence) should have been confirmed at all. hurry. of the New Year's Day attack in New Orleans and the explosion of a suicide truck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
Here is the irony of that argument: such reminders of the constant threat of domestic extremism only underline why the three Cabinet picks are unfit to be security administrators. Not only do they lack experience for the jobs Trump wants to entrust them with, but they have a history of undermining the essential institutions they would lead.
Patel has fought the FBI for years. Hegseth, apart from his history of alleged sexual assaults, drunkenness and bad driving, defended He accused and convicted war criminals as a Fox News host and helped persuade Trump, in his first term, to grant them clemency. Gabbard, who would be in charge of the 18 US intelligence agencies, has opposite his past findings about Russia's Vladimir Putin and the since-deposed Syrian strongman Bashar Assad, echoing the talking points of those murderous dictators.
But all three Cabinet nominees have the only quality that matters to Trump: loyalty to him.
That alone makes Patel, especially, a danger to the security of the United States. His eagerness to attack Trump'Political enemies would follow him to the FBI director's office. Among those targets are former President Biden; former Biden, Obama and even Trump administration officials; the prosecutors involved in the now-dismissed federal cases against Trump for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and for obtaining top secrets, and the witnesses in those cases.
Of course, Trump's enemies are not America's enemies. They are not those whom Wray and many others other security experts I have warned about. Trump and Patel's obsession with retaliation would necessarily distract the office from the real threats, domestic and foreign, that endanger the nation.
And now Trump has exacerbated the danger by releasing hundreds of January 6 extremists.
The now-pardoned QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, quickly gloated to X, in capital letters, that he was going to “buy some [expletive] Arms!!!”
Fortunately, Daniel Ball, imprisoned but not yet tried for allegedly assaulting officers and using an explosive on January 6, was not released despite a pardon due to a separate federal firearm charge: You have been formally charged with possession of a firearm despite having been convicted of serious crimes (domestic assault by strangulation and resisting police with violence). Good guy, and he's not the only one among those pardoned and released who has a criminal record.
The immediate threat, of course, is less to the American public than to the families, friends and associates of the freed attackers, whom they blame for their legal problems.
Jackson Reffitt, who turned in his father, Guy Reffitt, after Jan. 6 and testified during his father's trial that Guy threatened to kill him and his sister if they did, moved out and bought two guns for protection. “I can't imagine being safe right now,” the son said. he lamented to MSNBC. “This goes far beyond my father… Now I receive death threats every minute. “
Reffitt's son added that his father, “an incredible father” before falling under Trump's influence and becoming a leader of the anti-government group Three Percenters, has become “further radicalized in prison.”
Tasha Adams, the ex-wife of Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes, is free after Trump commuted her 18-year sentence to seditious conspiracyand Rhodes' oldest son, Dakota Adams, say they fear for their lives at the hands of the man who Tasha says sworn declarationHe abused them for years. “He's someone who had a kill list, always,” Tasha Adams. said an interviewer last fall, worried about the prospect of Trump releasing Rhodes. “And obviously, I'm on this list now and so are some of my kids, I'm sure.”
Rhodes, fresh out of prison, told reporters He expected Patel to “clean house” at the FBI. “I feel vindicated and validated,” he said, just as Jackson Reffitt predicted Rhodes and the others would.
Trump likes to claim, falselythat other countries empty their prisons to send criminals to the United States. It turns out that he is the one who has spawned violent convicts on earth.
@jackiekcalmes
