FBI Faces Backlash Over Hesitation to Label New Orleans Massacre as Terrorism
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy criticized the FBI Thursday over its “woke incoherence” by not referring to the attack in New Orleans, Louisiana, as terrorism “right off the bat.”
Shamsud Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old suspect who openly supported ISIS, killed at least 14 people and injured dozens more after plowing his vehicle into a crowd of people on News Year’s Day. McCarthy, who prosecuted a high-profile case following the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, criticized the FBI and Alethea Duncan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans Field Office, in his column for the National Review for not referring to the attack as terrorism despite fitting a “common terrorism pattern.”
Woke Incoherence
“It’s not bad enough that we are forced to begin 2025 by grappling with a horrific terrorist mass-murder attack on revelers in New Orleans; we are also being tormented by the FBI’s habitual woke incoherence regarding the atrocity … It was an obvious mass-murder attack by someone who was clearly trying to kill as many as possible — even prepared to kill with other weapons once the truck-weaponization component of the attack was completed. The attack, moreover, fits a common terrorism pattern of vehicle-ramming attacks,” McCarthy wrote in his column Wednesday.
McCarthy told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” guest host Rich Edson that the agency does not want to be “perceived as drawing a link between Islamic doctrine and violence.”
“This has been going on sadly for decades now. Basically, [the FBI] has drawn this line in order to keep ideology in a black box. So unless they instantly come up with information that ties somebody operationally to a known notorious terrorist organization, they take the position that it’s not terrorism,” McCarthy said. “And the reason for that is they don’t want to be perceived as drawing a link between Islamic doctrine and violence. So, I think they go out of their way to resist that conclusion even though in this case, it was a common sense conclusion.”
WATCH:
Authorities found an ISIS flag, weapons, an improvised explosive device and more explosives located around the French Quarter, the FBI confirmed in a Wednesday statement. The agency said during a Thursday press conference that Din Jabbar had pledged his allegiance to ISIS in a Facebook post before last summer and had wanted to kill his family, but was concerned that the media would focus on “the war between believers and disbelievers.”
FBI Missteps
McCarthy said the FBI came to the now-debunked conclusion that President-elect Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election without any evidence, though they were not willing to immediately refer to the attack in New Orleans as terrorism.
“[The FBI] is very selective in where they take that approach, so for example, for the first two years of the Trump administration, they actually went out of their way to suggest that the sitting president of the United States was a clandestine agent of Russia, even though they didn’t have any evidence for that proposition. Here, you have a situation where they have a mountain of evidence staring at them right in their faces and they basically go out of their way to say what is, is not,” McCarthy continued.
New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told reporters at a press conference that the incident was “very intentional behavior” and that the suspect attempted to “run over as many people as he could.”
