Bedingfield: Biden Tasked Intel Community to Deal with ‘Rising Tide of White Supremacy’

White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said Friday on ABC’s “The View” that President Joe Biden had tasked the intelligence community to deal with “the rising tide of white supremacy that we saw under the Trump presidency.”

Co-host Joy Behar asked, “So we’re learning of more domestic terrorism threats in this country in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. Just yesterday, a man was arrested nearby with a gun and 20 rounds of ammunition. Now Nancy Pelosi said they need more security because, quote/unquote, ‘The enemy is within Congress.’ That’s just unbelievable to me. President Biden wants to heal this nation. So how is he going to handle this rise in extremism, which includes elected officials like this Marjorie Taylor Greene person we were talking about?”

Bedingfield said, “Well, remember this is an incredibly important reason why President Biden ran in the first place. You remember the events in Charlottesville in August of 2017 where you had white supremacists, neo-Nazis marching in the streets in this country. I remember talking to him that day and remember his sense of moral outrage, and it motivated him.”

She continued, “He felt like this was an existential threat, the rising tide of white supremacy that we saw under the Trump presidency. He felt like this was truly an existential threat to the country. So it’s something that he talked about on the campaign trail. You heard him say a lot, you know, hate never disappears, it only hides. So he is committed from his position in the White House as the leader of this country to criticizing, condemning, aggressively pushing back on white supremacy. He’s going to lead very differently, frankly than Donald Trump did on this issue.”

She added, “Secondly, as a government, we’re also going to take this seriously. He has tasked the intelligence community with assessing where these threats are, with making sure that we are gathering information, that we are putting together a process to better share that information within the government so that we are acting on information, and we are taking these threats seriously. That represents a shift from the way this has been handled in the past. It’s something that will be a huge focus for him. It is, he believes, as I say, a moral question for our country, and one that he intends to grapple with as president.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN