In order to satisfy the Biden administration’s crackdown on the supposed threat of homegrown terror, Republican Representative Jim Jordan has claimed – citing agency whistleblowers – that the FBI may be inflating the statistics and instructing its agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’.
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday, Jordan – who is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee- argued that FBI agents are reportedly being pressured by their superiors to ‘juice the data’ and reclassify cases even if they do not meet the criteria for such a classification
He emphasized that the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous given the narrative the Biden administration is pushing that the greatest threat the United States is facing is domestic violent extremism.
Describing the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill as a prime example of this threat, Biden repeatedly talked up the threat of “domestic terrorism” in the US in the days after he took office in January 2021, following this rhetoric with a domestic terrorism strategy.
The Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department have received increased funding within this strategy while the former agency issued a memo classifying a broad range of dissidents and criminals as domestic violent extremists.
Wray told Congress last summer that this crackdown was necessary, stating that the FBI had doubled the number of domestic terrorism investigations which Attorney General Merrick Garland cited as proof that domestic extremism – particularly that involving white supremacists – is the most lethal threat the US was facing at the time.
Jordan, however, wrote to Wray that the Biden administration’s narrative may be misleading, as whistleblower testimony indicated, since agents were encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases with minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification when real DVE cases were lacking.
He added that agents who could reclassify most cases as domestic extremism were offered awards and promotions by the agent in charge of one field office, which reinforces the concerns regarding the FBI’s politicization under Wray’s leadership.
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