It's no secret why President Trump forced out FBI Director Christopher Wray, his first term as the nation's top law enforcement official: Shortly after the January 6 insurrection, Wray told Congress declared that the siege of the Capitol was an act of “domestic terrorism.” And over the next four years, he led the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history to bring the perpetrators to justice — including their instigator and cheerleader, Trump.
Even before January 6th, Wray repeated this repeatedly warned Congress determined that the problem of “domestic violent extremists”—DVEs, in bureau speak—equals or exceeds that of international terrorism. The threat “has spread across the country,” Wray said in 2021, and “it's not going away anytime soon.”
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes takes a critical look at the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Trump, on his first day blanket grace for the January 6 “DVEs” helped ensure this. This makes us all less safe.
The president will have an ally in excusing right-wing extremism when the Republican-led Senate confirms the president's pick to replace 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 picks for national security posts in his Cabinet – Patel as well as Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed Friday as Pentagon chief, and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence – should have been confirmed in the aftermath of the New Year's Day attack in New Orleans and a suicide truck explosion outside a Trump hotel in Vegas.
Here lies the irony of this argument: these reminders of the ongoing threat of domestic extremism only underscore why all three Cabinet members are unfit to be security officials. Not only do they lack experience for the tasks Trump wants to entrust them with, but they also have experience undermining the essential institutions they would lead.
Patel has fought against the FBI for years. Hegseth, apart from his Story for alleged sexual assault, drunkenness and mismanagement, defended As a Fox News anchor, he championed accused and convicted war criminals and helped convince Trump to grant them clemency in his first term. Gabbard, who would lead all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, did so against it their previous findings about Russia's Vladimir Putin and now-ousted Syrian leader Bashar Assad and instead repeat the talking points of these murderous dictators.
But all three Cabinet choices have one prerequisite that Trump cares about: loyalty to him.
That alone makes Patel in particular a threat to America's security. His eagerness to attack Trump'His political enemies would follow him into the FBI director's office. These targets include former President Biden; former Biden, Obama and even Trump administration officials; Prosecutors involved in the federal cases against Trump have now been dismissed for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and for leaking top secrets and the witnesses in those cases.
Of course, Trump's enemies are not America's enemies. They are not the ones that Wray has so many other security experts that I warned about. Trump and Patel's fixation on retaliation would inevitably distract the office from the real threats at home and abroad endangering the nation.
And now Trump has exacerbated the danger by releasing hundreds of extremists on January 6th.
Now-pardoned QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley quickly exulted in all caps X that he was “going to buy some (expletive) weapons!!!”
Fortunately, Daniel Ball, who was jailed but not yet tried for alleged assault and explosives on January 6, was not released despite the pardon separate federal weapons charge: He was charged with possession of a firearm despite previous convictions for serious crimes (domestic assault by strangulation and resisting police with violence). Nice guy – and not the only one among those who were pardoned and released because of previous convictions.
The immediate threat, of course, is less to the American public than to the families, friends and associates of the released attackers, whom they blame for their legal travails.
Jackson Reffitt, who gave up his father Guy Reffitt after January 6th and testified during his father's trial This guy threatened to kill him and his sister if they did, moved, and bought two guns for protection. “I can’t imagine being safe right now,” the son said defendant to MSNBC. “It goes way beyond my father… I get death threats every minute now. ”
The younger Reffitt added that his father, “a great father” before he fell under Trump's influence and became leader of the anti-government Three Percenters, was “further radicalized in prison.”
Tasha Adams, the ex-wife of Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes, is free after Trump commuted his 18-year prison sentence seditious conspiracyand Rhodes' eldest son, Dakota Adams, say they fear for their lives at the man's hands, according to Tasha statutory declarationHe abused her for years. “He’s someone who had a kill list – always,” Tasha Adams told an interviewer last fall who worried about the prospect of Trump freeing Rhodes. “And of course I’m on that list now, as are some of my children, I’m sure.”
Rhodes, fresh out of prison, told reporters He hoped Patel would be “cleaned up” at the FBI. “I feel vindicated and vindicated,” he said — just as Jackson Reffitt had predicted to Rhodes and the others.
Trump likes to claim incorrectlythat other countries empty their prisons to send criminals to America. It turns out that he is the one who released violent convicts into the countryside.