WASHINGTON –FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee Wednesday that the FBI treats domestic terrorist threats as seriously as foreign threats and has arrested 176 people on domestic terrorism charges this year.
“We take both of them very, very seriously,” he said. “It’s not ideology or anything else. It’s the danger and threats toward the people of this country.”
Wray also said there are 1,000 open FBI cases regarding domestic terrorism and white supremacy.
“I don’t think many Americans understand the level of threat that we have in this country from white supremacists, anti-government, and other violent extremists,” said Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “We’ve had multiple hearings on the threat of ISIS as it relates to homeland security. We have had zero hearings on the threat of domestic terrorists and the threat they pose in our country, and our response to it.”
McCaskill said since 9/11, there have been 62 incidents in the U.S. involving white supremacists and violent extremists, compared with 23 involving Islamic extremists. She said last month’s terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was run over and killed while counter protesting a white nationalist protest, was “tragic, vile and evil.”
Brad Griffin, Communications Director of League of the South, said in an email Wednesday that the FBI numbers are “based on absurd, arbitrary accounting methods like classifications of hate crimes.”
“The Fort Hood incident, for example, was classified as “workplace violence. Off the top of my head, I can list the worst incidents of “white supremacist domestic terrorism” in recent memory (Dylann Roof, Glenn Miller, Wade Michael Page) and they are dwarfed by Islamic radicals (Chattanooga, Orlando, San Bernardino) and black supremacist activities (Micah X, Cosmo Setepenra, Vester Flanagan, Ismaiiyl Brinsley).”
In 2011, the Obama administration created a strategic plan to counter violent extremism in the United States through community outreach, research and training in local communities and organizations to reduce factors that led people to domestic terrorism. Last year, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency, said that “no cohesive strategy with measurable outcomes has been established” to guide the multi-agency effort.
Wray said that the biggest areas of concern for the FBI are those who support terrorist propaganda, those who are enabled to act after gaining inspiration from members of foreign terrorist organizations, and those who are directed by members of foreign terrorist organizations to commit specific acts.
“Currently, the FBI has designated the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham and homegrown violent extremists as the main terrorism threats to the Homeland,” he said.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke testified that her agency will not “allow pervasive terrorism to become the new normal.” She said President Donald Trump has approved “tough but tailored” restrictions with countries that do not cooperate on immigration screening.
“I’ve just now been starting in my first few weeks on the job, getting out to some of the field offices, and there are significant numbers of agents (working on domestic terrorism),” Wray said. “So I can assure you that it’s a top, top priority for us.”