The FBI on Thursday denied a report that it is targeting Trump supporters ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.
But the FBI said in a statement to news outlets this week that the report is false. The Epoch Times has contacted the bureau for comment Friday.
“Any allegation that the FBI targets individuals solely for their political beliefs is categorically false,” an FBI spokesperson said. “The FBI investigates those who commit acts of violence or threaten violence, and we do not take action based on political belief or any First Amendment protected activity.”
The spokesperson added that the “threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly,” adding, “The FBI’s goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence, and threats of violence.”
“Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism [AGAAVE] is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI’s top threat priorities,” the statement continued. “This threat includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists—some of whom are motivated by a desire to harm those with a real or perceived association with a political party or faction.”
Those so-called extremists “have targeted both Republican and Democratic members of Congress,” the spokesperson said, without elaborating. “We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person’s political beliefs or affiliations,” the statement said.
In the Newsweek report, neither President Trump nor his Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogan were assigned to the aforementioned threat category. The article, however, claimed that unnamed “insiders” said that it applies to alleged “political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.”
Meanwhile, one unnamed intelligence official told the outlet he believes that President Trump’s supporters are the “greatest threat of violence domestically …politically … that’s the reality and the problem set.”
The alleged official then asked: “But whether Trump and his supporters are a threat to national security, to the country, whether they represent a threat of civil war? That’s a trickier question. And that’s for the country to deal with, not the FBI.”
“It is clear from these disclosures, and especially in the wake of Special Counsel John Durham’s report, that the FBI has become politically weaponized,” the report said.
One of the whistleblowers, Steve Friend, alleged the bureau opened hundreds of Jan. 6 cases to create the impression that domestic terrorism is a bigger problem than it really is. He and two others appeared in front of a House panel on government weaponization earlier this year, also accusing the FBI of retaliating against them for coming forward.
“There were phone calls,” Mr. Friend said earlier this year. “I wasn’t on them, but multiple people told me, confirmed for me, phone calls were made. They said we checked to say, ‘Are you going to charge this guy?’ And they said, ‘We don’t know yet. We’re gonna go back to the codebook and see if we can find something to charge.’”
The FBI has denied some of the agents’ claims and said it did not act in a retaliatory way against them.
“The FBI’s mission is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people,” the FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times earlier this year. “The FBI has not and will not retaliate against individuals who make protected whistleblower disclosures.”
