FBI director says domestic terrorism cases have soared to 2,000 in recent months
Source: Washington Post
By Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky
March 2, 2021 at 11:46 a.m. EST
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said Tuesday that his agents are pursuing roughly 2,000 domestic terrorism cases — a huge spike as the FBI tries to show it is taking the threat of such attacks seriously in the wake of January’s pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“We have significantly grown the number of investigations and arrests,” Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee, noting that the number of such cases has more than doubled since he became the FBI director in 2017. He had testified in September that the number of such cases was about 1,000. By the end of 2020, there were about 1,400 such cases, and after Jan. 6 the figure ballooned again, the director said.
Wray also defended the bureau’s handling of intelligence in advance of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, asserting that agents rapidly shared what they were learning with other law enforcement agencies, rejecting criticism that the FBI did not do enough to warn Capitol Police of the looming threat.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the committee chairman, pressed Wray on how the bureau shared a situation report, prepared by the FBI’s Norfolk field office a day before the riot, which warned of specific appeals for violence — including a call for “war” at the Capitol. At a hearing last week, the D.C. police chief and the former Capitol Police chief conceded their agencies had received the warning, but suggested the FBI should have more aggressively sounded the alarm.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/christopher-wray-fbi-capitol-riot/2021/03/01/a49d177a-7ae7-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html
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