House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Tuesday on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” that he is investigating if the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI were discouraged from pursuing white nationalists for domestic terror “because that was viewed as an attack on Trump supporters.”
In a video from the Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said, “It’s been a relatively frequent sight at summer’s violence events to see individuals acting in coordination, holding the A-symbol for Antifa. In light of the ever-present left-wing threats, I’m concerned about resource shifting talk among our colleagues across the aisle.”
Cuomo asked, “How do you stop the growth of right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism if you have this push back from the right that we don’t want to shift any resources from those bad guys on the left as if we were talking about Democrats and Republicans and you know, not neo-Nazis and nationalists. Are you worried that we may not be able to fight back against these people the way we should?”
Schiff said, “I am worried about it. In fact, we are investigating that issue in the committee right now. That is, in the weeks and months and years leading up to January 6, was there such a fear among intelligence professionals at the Department of Homeland Security or in terms of resource allocation within the Bureau that they couldn’t go after domestic terrorists of the white nationalist variety because that was discouraged because that was viewed as an attack on Trump supporters?”
He added, “We did see, and you will remember well, Bill Barr out hyping Antifa was the threat that we needed to worry about when the threat that was metastasizing was the threat of white nationalist domestic terror. And so We did not have the resources potentially that we should because of that political pressure. Comments like you quoted contribute to that resistance to putting the resources where they need to go to being clear about the threat that we face. Not being equivocal about it. If you cannot diagnosis the threat, if you can’t speak directly to the threat, you cannot respond to the threat.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN