President Joe Biden’s FBI is once again under heavy criticism over its initial public denial that an attack by an ISIS-inspired Muslim, who murdered 14 people and injured at least 35 others who were partying to celebrate the New Year in the French Corner of New Orleans, was an act of terrorism. The eleven men and three women killed in the attack ranged in age from 18 to 63. The 35 people who were injured included two Israeli reserve soldiers in their 20s who recently fought in Gaza and Lebanon and were visiting New Orleans as their second to last stop in a six-week tour of the U.S. One suffered critical injuries during the truck attack, including head trauma, which required two life-saving surgeries and the other is in stable condition after undergoing two surgeries for internal injuries.
The attack was carried out by American-born, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar at 3:15 a.m., before dawn on the morning of January 1. Jabbar evaded a police SUV and barricades blocking New Orleans’ famous Bourbon Street, by driving a rented Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck at high speed on the sidewalk for three blocks between Canal and Conti Streets. According to New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, Jabbar was “trying to run over as many people as he possibly could.”
After his truck was stopped by crashing into a heavy piece of construction equipment on Bourbon Street, Jabbar exited the vehicle armed with a Glock pistol and a .308 caliber AR-10 semi-automatic assault rifle and wearing body armor. He then engaged local police in a shootout in which he was killed, and two police officers were wounded.
During the first formal news conference by law enforcement and New Orleans officials, a few hours after the attack, Alethea Duncan, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, announced, “We’ll be taking over the investigative lead for this event.” She then flatly declared, “This is not a terrorist event,” despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary that was already known to law enforcement authorities.
Later in that same press conference, LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, contradicted FBI official Duncan’s benign characterization of the incident and minced no words by declaring, “Know that the city of New Orleans was impacted by a terrorist attack. It’s all still under investigation.”
As more information about the attack became public, including the Muslim faith of the attacker, the fact that a black and white ISIS flag was found attached to the hitch on his truck, and the trail of messages he left on social media announced his intention to kill as many people as possible in the name of ISIS, the terrorist nature of the attack became obvious to all. In reaction to outraged protests from local elected officials at the attempt to whitewash the attack, the FBI was forced to issue a series of statements acknowledging that it was an act of Islamic terrorism, but without apologizing for having initially misled the public, or disciplining Duncan for having made a false public statement at a crucial time in the FBI’s name.
Trump Blasts The FBI For Its Pattern Of Failure
President-elect Trump and his supporters were quick to claim that the FBI’s mischaracterization of the New Orleans attack was typical of the Biden administration’s larger failure to protect the American people from a resurgence of Islamic terrorism and other forms of violent crime. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during rallies, and elsewhere, that radical Islamic terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of America, a complete and total disaster.”
A source within the Trump camp told Fox News that the FBI’s faulty response to the New Orleans attack illustrated the agency’s urgent need for new leadership. “The FBI has a no-fail mission. There is no room for error. When they fail, Americans die. It’s a necessity that Kash Patel gets confirmed [as Trump’s new FBI Director] ASAP.”
There was also some embarrassment over the FBI’s slow reaction to the attack, failing to show up to search the attacker’s home in Houston, Texas until 1 p.m., a full 9 hours after the attack, according to New York Post reporter Jennie Taer, who announced in a post on X that she and other reporters had staked out the address before the FBI arrived. “The FBI didn’t show up at the suspect’s address until 1 p.m. today. We were on the scene before. No one came out of the home or answered the door,” Taer wrote.
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee reacted to Taer’s report by declaring, “The fact that a reporter has better intel than the FBI tells us all we need to know. The FBI has failed its core mission.”
A TERRORIST’S ODYSSEY FROM HOUSTON TO NEW ORLEANS
The day after the attack on Bourbon Street, a much more senior FBI official than Duncan, Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia, provided the news media with more of the information the agency had gathered on Jabbar’s movements and preparations for the attack. Jabbar had rented the truck he used in the attack in his hometown of Houston on December 30, using the Turo peer-to-peer online carsharing service. He drove it along the I-10 interstate highway to New Orleans the next day. During that journey, Jabbar recorded five videos that he posted on Facebook before the attack.
In one of the videos, which he recorded as a message to his family, Jabbar said, “I wanted you to know that I joined ISIS earlier this year.” He also told them, “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly.” He explained that his original plan had been to organize a “celebration” for them by making them “witness the killing of the apostates.”
“He was 100 percent inspired by ISIS,” FBI agent Raia said about Jabbar. “We’re digging through more social media, more interviews … to ascertain more about that.”
Raia added that “in the first video, Jabbar explains he originally planned to harm his family and friends, but was concerned the news headlines would not focus on the ‘war between the believers and the disbelievers.’”
When Jabbar arrived in the New Orleans area on the afternoon of December 31, he stopped at a one-story house on Mandeville Street that he had rented for a short term to make last-minute preparations for the attack. Before he left the house for Bourbon Street, Jabbar made a crude attempt to set the building on fire to destroy any remaining evidence. But he made the mistake of starting the fire in a closed linen closet which did not have a flow of fresh air, so the fire was smothered for lack of oxygen before it could reach other areas of the house where Jabbar had placed a volatile liquid accelerant to spread the flames. After the attack, police found a homemade silencer for one of his guns, and some extra explosive material that Jabbar had left behind.
Michael Adasko, who lives next door to the rental property, said that his home’s security camera recorded pictures of a man who looked like Jabbar “unloading materials” at about 10 p.m. December 31, from a truck matching the description of the one used in the attack on Bourbon Street five hours later. But when Adasko returned home, shortly after midnight, he said the truck was gone.
The FBI also released local surveillance video showing Jabbar, an hour and a quarter before the truck attack, planting two ice chests, which each contained a homemade bomb (IED), in separate locations on Bourbon Street that he had intended to detonate remotely with a transmitter that was later found in his truck. However, according to an official with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the electronic match Jabbar was using instead of a regular detonator was not appropriate to the task, revealing his inexperience in handling the explosives.
THE NEW ORLEANS TERRORIST APPARENTLY ACTED ALONE
FBI agent Raia also withdrew an earlier statement by the FBI suggesting that Jabbar may have had accomplices. After conducting interviews, examining the records and call logs on Jabbar’s three cellphones and two laptops, and conducting other parts of the investigation, Raia said the FBI now believes that he probably acted alone. “All investigative details and evidence that we have now still support that Jabbar acted alone here in New Orleans,” Raia said. “We have not seen any indications of an accomplice in the United States, but we are still looking into potential associates in the U.S. and outside of our borders.”
“That could [still] change,” Raia added, “but right now we have a much better picture and much more confidence than what we were dealing with just 24 hours ago.”
According to an earlier report from the Washington Post, the FBI was investigating the possibility that at least three men and a woman, who were also seen on the surveillance video near the bombs that Jabbar had planted, were also part of the plot, but later determined that they had just stopped to look into the coolers sitting alongside the street before continuing innocently on their way.
According to Lyonel Myrthil, the FBI special agent in charge of the New Orleans Field Office, who is agent Duncan’s immediate superior, as part of its investigation the bureau also tracked Jabbar’s movements during the past few years. “Our agents are getting answers to where he went, who he went with, and how those trips may or may not tie into his actions here,” Myrthil said.
Jabbar had traveled to Cairo, Egypt, from June 22 to July 3, 2023, and seven days after he returned from Egypt to the U.S., he made a separate trip to Ontario, Canada. Jabbar also made a more recent visit to Tampa, Florida.
In October and November of 2024, Jabbar visited New Orleans to scout the site of his attack on Bourbon Street, and made a detailed video recording of the area using Meta smart glasses with a built-in camera that can be operated hands-free. He was also wearing the Meta glasses in the truck while he was carrying out the attack, and apparently had intended to use them to livestream a video of the attack in real time.
After the FBI changed its narrative about whether or not Jabbar was acting alone, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, complained that while “sometimes the information we put out, we end up finding out [was] incorrect, but this is about something important: transparency.”
NEW ORLEANS PLAYING CATCH-UP ON SECURITY
The governor said that more than 1,000 law enforcement officers, on the local, state, and federal levels, were investigating the attack. Out of caution, immediately after the attack, authorities closed Bourbon Street to visitors and postponed for 24 hours a nationally famous annual college football game, known as the Sugar Bowl, which had been scheduled for the evening of January 1.
The site of the attack on Bourbon Street was re-opened on the afternoon of the next day, after the placement of new security barriers, manned by local and state police and National Guard troops. Local authorities admitted that security obstacles, known as bollards, which had been in place on Bourbon Street to prevent such a vehicular attack were removed before December 31st to be strengthened and reinstalled in time for next month’s Super Bowl professional football championship game, to be held at the Superdome stadium in New Orleans on February 9.
The site of the attack attracted small crowds of tourists accompanied by musicians, dancers, and other street performers for which the area is famous. Other people came there to light candles and leave flowers or other tokens of grief and support as a makeshift memorial for the victims of the attack.
LAS VEGAS TRUCK EXPLOSION UNRELATED TO THE NEW ORLEANS ATTACK
In addition to the Bourbon Street attack, the FBI was investigating the suspicious explosion, about five hours later on January 1, of a Tesla Cybertruck at the valet parking area in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The sole occupant of the vehicle, U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Matthew Livelsberger, was found dead, but the blast did little damage to the hotel and caused only minor injuries to seven people who were nearby.
Livelsberger, whose army unit is stationed in Germany, had been on holiday leave to visit with his wife and 8-month-old baby at their home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when he rented the Cybertruck and then drove it to Las Vegas.
Authorities were initially suspicious that the two incidents might be linked after discovering that Jabbar and Livelsberger had rented their vehicles from the same Turo peer-to-peer carsharing service. Both men had also been stationed at Fort Bragg during their army service, but there was no evidence that they had been in recent contact.
The low-grade explosion in the Cybertruck was fueled by the ignition of “a combination of fireworks, [propane] gas tanks, and camping fuel in the bed of the vehicle.” However, FBI investigators believed that Livelsberger, as a trained soldier, would have used much more powerful explosives if he had intended to do serious damage.
Upon further investigation, it was discovered that Livelsberger had been suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), likely due to a traumatic brain injury that he suffered several years ago while being deployed with his Special Forces unit in the Middle East.
Livelsberger had confided in a friend that the injury had caused a change in his behavior. He said that he was suffering from memory problems, poor concentration, brain fog, and headaches, but that he was afraid to seek medical help for the problems because that might ruin his career in the Special Forces. He also admitted to suffering from feelings of guilt over some of his actions as a soldier on the battlefield.
When it was discovered that Livelsberger’s cause of death was an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, FBI investigators concluded that the incident was most likely another tragic suicide of a combat veteran due to the symptoms of PTSD, and was not related to the truck attack in New Orleans.
WHO WAS THE NEW ORLEANS ATTACKER?
The FBI also released more personal information about the attacker’s background, including his record of service in the U.S. Army, his recent marital and financial troubles, as well his actions leading up to the attack.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar was born in 1982 to African-American parents, and grew up in Beaumont, Texas, a town east of Houston near the Louisiana border. Although he was raised as a Christian and attended a local Baptist church during his childhood, he and his father converted to Islam. He changed his surname from Young to Jabbar, and then lived as a Muslim for most of his adult life.
As a young man, Jabbar had several relatively minor run-ins with the law. He was sentenced to nine months of probation and fined $100 after pleading guilty to a 2002 charge of petty theft at a court in the Houston suburb of Katy, Texas. Three years later he was arrested for driving with a suspended license in Beaumont, and was sentenced to six months on probation after pleading no contest. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of alcohol while serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as a human resources and IT (information technology) specialist. He had enlisted in 2007, and after having served on active duty for eight years, including an 11-month tour in Afghanistan starting in 2009, he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army at the rank of staff sergeant in 2015. He then became a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, where he served until 2020.
Jabbar was enrolled in Georgia State University, graduating in 2017 with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in computer information systems. During the decade between 2012 and 2022, Jabbar was married and divorced three times, fathering several children. After working from 2019 to 2021 as a cloud consulting manager for the accounting firm Ernst & Young, he secured a job at the Deloitte International business consulting firm as a “senior solutions specialist,” earning a yearly salary of more than $120,000. On his internal profile page on the Deloitte website, Jabbar posted about his interests, including hunting and prayer, as well as an English translation of a section of the Quran that talks about “the righteous. . . servants of All-h [and] a day whose evil will be widespread.”
After the attack on Bourbon Street, Deloitte issued a statement declaring, “We are shocked to learn of reports today that the individual identified as a suspect [Jabbar] had any association with our firm. The named individual served in a staff-level role since being hired in 2021. Like everyone, we are outraged by this shameful and senseless act of violence and are doing all we can to assist authorities in their investigation.”
A substantial portion of Jabbar’s salary income from Deloitte was spent on alimony and child support payments, and his licensed real estate business, Blue Meadow Properties LLC, which was unprofitable. It stopped operating after undergoing a “tax forfeiture” in March 2023 according to Texas Secretary of State records.
In a statement filed with the court by his divorce lawyer during that period, Jabbar portrayed himself as broke, with a net income of around $7,500 and monthly expenses totaling about $8,960, as well as a credit card debt of tens of thousands of dollars. In a January 2022 email to one of his wife’s divorce lawyers, Jabbar wrote, “Time is of the essence. I cannot afford the house payment. It is past due in excess of $27,000 and in danger of foreclosure if we delay settling the divorce,” referring to the family’s four-bedroom home in Fresno, Texas.
JABBAR’S RECENT TURN TO MORE RELIGIOUS ISLAM
According to one of his ex-wives, Jabbar did not begin taking his Muslim faith seriously until relatively recently. It prompted him to move last year to a mobile home in a large Muslim community on Crescent Peak Drive in Harris County, north of Houston, but he apparently made few friends there, he did not attend either of the two mosques located nearby, according to their congregants, and he had only limited contacts with his neighbors.
Jabbar had begun publishing audio recordings online in which he condemned popular American music as a gateway “into the things that [All-h] had made forbidden to us” such as alcohol and marijuana, and that, “the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad’s followers. . . is a sign of the end times.”
Marilyn Bradford, who had been a neighbor of Jabbar’s when he had lived at an apartment complex in the northern part of Houston until 2022, described him to a Wall Street Journal reporter as “very to himself. . . He wasn’t a sociable person at all.” Nevertheless, the 70-year-old retiree said Jabbar was a good neighbor who regularly asked her if she needed anything and who gave her his vacuum cleaner, washer, and dryer before he moved away.
“Every morning when he saw me he said, ‘How are you doing Miss Marilyn?’” said Bradford. “I can’t understand what he was going through.”
“He was good to his children. I never heard him get out of line with anybody,” she added.
Two of Jabbar’s friends from his years at what was then known as Central High School in Beaumont, Texas described him to the Washington Post as “a quiet guy” who was a good student, friendly and well-liked.
According to Chris Pousson, who still lives in Beaumont, as a student, “He just kind of kept to himself. He was really reserved. He wasn’t outgoing and wasn’t disruptive in class. He wasn’t a troublemaker.”
Pousson lost touch with Jabbar after they both graduated high school in 2001, but years later they made contact once again over Facebook. However, Pousson recalled, that the last time he spoke to Jabbar, around 2018, he noticed that his friend had become much more outwardly religious. “Every post or every conversation we had would eventually gravitate toward All-h,” Pousson recalled. “It was nothing negative or violent, but it just seemed like that was what he was thinking about and passionate about.”
LINKING THE BOURBON STREET ATTACK TO OCTOBER 7
The online magazine Spiked’s chief political writer, Brendan O’Neill notes that, while “the atrocity on Bourbon Street on New Year’s morning would have been horrifying in any era. . . the massacre in [New Orleans] hits even harder, it hurts even more. For ours is an epoch of excuse-making for [Islamic terrorist] violence. Ours is a time in which. . . educated, influential, and supposedly ‘progressive’ [people] issue craven apologias for precisely the kind of ideological sadism that was inflicted on the [victims] of New Orleans. They’re on record calling such mass murder ‘resistance’. They’ve hailed its practitioners as ‘martyrs’. . .
“The New Orleans massacre follows more than a year of noisy [apologies for antisemitism] in educated circles in the West. Since Hamas’ pogrom of 7 October 2023, sympathy for [Islamic terrorism] has been all the rage. ‘Long live the intifada’, they cried. . . following an ‘intifada’ that involved the slaughter of more than a thousand Jews by an army of fanatical [Hamas terrorists] dragged us to ever greater depths of ethical delirium and moral depravity. . .”
O’Neill wrote that while “the atrocity on Bourbon Street on New Year’s morning would have been horrifying in any era. . . the truth is that something very like the New Orleans massacre happened on 7 October, only on a far larger scale. . . The 364 young men and women butchered at the Nova music festival [in southern Israel] by the [Hamas invaders] from Gaza were every bit as innocent as the slain of Bourbon Street. . . [They] were indistinguishable, in their spirit and their liberty, from the revelers [killed in] New Orleans. . .
“[A] creepy empathy for the [radical Islamic terrorist] ideology has spread like a pox through our institutions. For years, the West failed to take seriously the threat posed by the [Islamic terrorist] menace. Even as hundreds were massacred by [Islamic terrorists] in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, we said ‘Don’t. . . say or do anything that might stir up ‘Islamophobia’. Over the past year, this lethal insouciance [has] morphed into something even worse: active sympathy for. . . the killing of [innocent] citizens by [deranged Islamic] ideologues with a grievance.”
O’Neill concludes, “The attack on New Orleans was an attack on America itself. . . We should mourn the victims and then confront, head-on, the unsettling rapport with such neo-fascism that has bubbled up in our very own societies.”
THE FAMILIARITY OF CONTEMPORARY TERROR
Matthew Hennessy, the Wall Street Journal’s deputy op-ed editor, writes that “the remarkable thing about [the] early-morning truck attack in New Orleans was its familiarity. Attacks of this sort have become common. Only [two weeks] ago, an alleged Islamic terrorist slaughtered five and injured 235 by plowing through a packed [year-end holiday] market in Magdeburg, Germany. In 2021, Darrell Brooks killed six and injured dozens when he rammed a [year-end] parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. On the afternoon of [October 31, 2017], Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, [an immigrant from Uzbekistan], drove his rented pickup truck for a mile down the [bicycle path alongside lower Manhattan’s West Street], killing eight,” and after leaving the truck, he yelled “All-hu Akbar.”
Hennessey also notes that the deadliest terrorist truck attack took place on the evening of Bastille Day, July 14, 2016, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, when 86 people lost their lives due to a 19-ton truck driven by Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in France. ISIS claimed responsibility for that attack. How quick we are to file it all away and forget!
Another indication of the dangerous level of tolerance for deadly violence in American society was the reaction to the December 4 assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown Manhattan street in front of the Hilton Hotel. The assassin, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was identified and tracked down by an intense manhunt; he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and then extradited to New York City for trial. However, Mangione was treated sympathetically on some liberal social media platforms catering to a young audience, while his victim was treated with contempt because he was the leader of a healthcare industry with an alleged propensity for denying legitimate medical claims.
PARALLELS TO THE 2009 MASS SHOOTING AT FORT HOOD
Last week’s attack in New Orleans also recalls the mass shooting that took place at Fort Hood, Texas on November 5, 2009, when Nidal Hasan, an American-born Muslim U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.
At 1:34 p.m. local time, Hasan entered the Fort Hood processing center where personnel received routine medical treatment. After shouting, “All-hu Akbar!” he opened fire with an FN five-seven semi-automatic pistol, specifically targeting the soldiers in uniform in the room who, according to military policy, were not carrying their personal firearms.
Hasan fired a total of 214 rounds before the attack finally ended in a brief gunbattle in which Hasan was seriously wounded by civilian policeman Sergeant Mark Todd, who had arrived on the scene sometime after Hasan had started shooting.
According to his cousin, Hasan had turned against the United States after he heard stories from his army patients who had returned from fighting Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to a National Public Radio report, while Hasan was stationed at Walter Reed Medical Center between 2003 to 2009, his supervisors gave him poor evaluations. His fellow medical students and faculty members at Walter Reed also said that they were “deeply troubled” by Hasan’s behavior, which they variously described as “disconnected,” “aloof,” “paranoid,” “belligerent” and “schizoid,” during his internship and residency.
As to his motivation for the attack, in documents he wrote Hasan called himself a “Soldier of All-h,” and said that his attack was due to his belief that there was a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between American democracy and Islamic religious principles.
Even though then-Senator Joe Lieberman called the Fort Hood shooting “the most destructive terrorist attack on America since September 11, 2001,” and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey also described it as a terrorist attack, the FBI said that its investigation of the Fort Hood attack found no evidence to indicate that Hasan had any co-conspirators or was part of a broader terrorist plot. In fact, the Defense Department to this day classifies Hasan’s attack as an act of workplace violence rather than a terrorist event.
IS TODAY’S FBI UP TO THE TASK?
Fast forward 15 years to last week’s deadly attack on Bourbon Street by another rogue American Muslim with extensive U.S. military experience. In a press conference on January 1 at Camp David, President Joe Biden expressed his confidence that the FBI is “working nonstop to investigate this heinous act,” and was “leading the investigation to determine what happened, why it happened, and whether there was any continuing threat to public safety.”
Given the FBI’s poor start by telling the public that the Bourbon Street attack was not an act of terrorism, and its recent record of having repeatedly allowed itself to be weaponized against President Biden’s political opponents, starting with President-elect Trump and his supporters, many Americans fear that the agency is no longer up to the task of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks as its “number one priority,” under its current tainted leadership.
According to Jordan Boyd, writing on the conservative Federalist website, “The FBI wholly disqualified itself from being the lead on the New Orleans investigation [after] the agency spent recent years redirecting its attention and resources from top issues like violent criminal acts that lead to mass casualties. . . [to efforts to smear] Catholics, concerned parents, and Trump-voters as domestic terrorists; manufacturing scandals like the Russia collusion hoax; killing the [true] Hunter Biden laptop story [by falsely calling it Russian disinformation]; raiding the [Mar-a-Lago] home of the former and future president [with 30 armed FBI agents in search of classified documents to which he had a right]; and interfering in [three consecutive] presidential elections.”
President-elect Trump was quick to signal his lack of confidence in FBI Director Christopher Wray by announcing his replacement with Kash Patel shortly after the November 5 election. After Wray took the hint by announcing his resignation, Trump was quick to remind the public of why Wray had lost his trust.
TRUMP SAYS THE FBI HAS LOST ITS WAY AND ABUSED ITS VAST POWERS
“Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America. They have used their vast powers to threaten and destroy many innocent Americans, some of whom will never be able to recover from what has been done to them,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social.
In addition, 20 Republican members of the House and Senate sent a letter to Wray last year blasting an internal memo from the FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia, that “singled out traditional Catholics for their pro-life views, accusing [what the memo dubbed ‘radical-traditional-Catholics] of ‘hostility towards [pro-choice] advocates’ in the aftermath of the [Supreme Court’s] Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v. Wade].”
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI were both heavily criticized by parents nationwide in 2021 after Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing the FBI to treat angry parents speaking out at school boards against the liberal indoctrination of their young school-age children with gender and race-based curriculums and critical race theory as domestic terrorists. The memo was issued by Garland after he received a request from the teachers’ union-dominated National School Boards Association, which feared that activist parents were a threat to the unions’ political control of the nation’s public schools.
School choice activist Tiffany Justice, the founder of a parent group called Moms for Liberty, told Fox News that Garland’s memo showed that “the FBI was [being] used as a weapon by the DOJ against parents who dared to voice their concerns at the most local level: their school.”
Iowa’s Republican senator, Charles Grassley, sent FBI Director Wray a blistering 11-page letter accusing the FBI of acting as an “accomplice to the Democrats’ false information campaign” against his committee’s investigation into “Biden-family corruption.” In his letter, Grassley specifically accused the FBI of having “sat on bribery allegations” against Joe Biden when he served as vice president, as well as Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and corrupt Ukrainian officials, while strictly scrutinizing former President Trump.”
In his letter to Wray, Grassley also wrote, “The FBI under your watch had possession of incriminating information against President Biden [from a ‘highly credible’ FBI confidential human source] for three years. . . but did nothing to investigate it.”
Finally, FBI Director Wray insulted former President Trump by publicly suggesting that when he was wounded in the ear by an assassin during a presidential campaign rally in Pennsylvania this summer, he had been hit with a fragment of shrapnel rather than a potentially fatal bullet that passed within an inch of Trump’s skull.
THE ERA OF POLITICIZED JUSTICE IS COMING TO AN END
Fortunately, however, the era of a politically compromised FBI and DOJ is coming to an end. A new Trump-appointed leadership will soon take charge and embark upon a mission to restore the reputations of those agencies as unbiased and politically independent champions of law and order whose integrity and dedication to the standard of equal justice for all, and to the safety of this country and its people, can once more be trusted.
