FBI report finds white supremacists ‘seek affiliation’ with law enforcement
They 'very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of' racist agendas, officials say.
In today’s water-is-wet news, a new report from the FBI declares white supremacists intentionally seek jobs within law enforcement in order to be able to commit acts of violence against minorities.
The FBI report, which was obtained by ABC News, was based on investigations between 2016 and 2020. It warns that right-wing extremists will “very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of” their radical agendas.
The research was conducted by the FBI office in San Antonio, Texas and distributed to law enforcement agencies both across the state and throughout the nation.
“In the long term, FBI San Antonio assesses [racially motivated violent extremists] successfully entering military and law enforcement careers almost certainly will gain access to non-public tradecraft and information, enabling them to enhance operational security and develop new tactics in and beyond the FBI San Antonio region,” reads the report, according to ABC News.
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The extremists the FBI probed and cited were supposedly followers of a white-supremacist publication called Siege, which is known to spread neo-Nazi content.
Late last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.”
“At the FBI,” he said, “we’ve been sounding the alarm on it for a number of years now.”
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The bureau’s number of investigations into domestic terrorism, added Wray, has more than doubled in four years — and in that same period, the count of white-supremacist arrests and those of others motivated by racial extremism has nearly tripled.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said Monday that previous FBI leadership questioned by Congress claimed that there was “no evidence that racist infiltration was a problem” in law enforcement entities.
“Now, the January insurrection — and the growing evidence of off-duty law enforcement officers being involved in the attack on Congress — and this newly-leaked report confirm in my mind that the FBI’s failure to level with the American people about organized racist infiltration of law enforcement is having dangerous and deadly consequences,” Raskin wrote in a statement.
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“We are continuing to press the FBI for information about how it plans to counteract the contagion of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement bodies,” Raskin said.
“The FBI must answer specifically for what it is doing to combat white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement,” he contended. “It must work to root out officers who seek state power to terrorize our communities under color of law.”
In 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report that said modern police violence follows patterns from the past 100 years.
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