The Woke FBI

Progressives make bureau speak nonsense

WHAT happened to the FBI? I ask this as a retired FBI leader with a quarter-century of experience. Like many of us, I worriedly watched the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue hostage standoff unfold. When alerted that my former teammates on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had been deployed to handle the tactical resolution, I breathed a sigh of relief. The HRT is the world’s premier domestic-counterterrorism team. It knows what it’s doing.

Reports from Congregation Beth Israel clearly indicated that British national Malik Faisal Akram, armed with a pistol, had taken a rabbi and three congregants hostage. He was said to want the release of Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, convicted and sentenced to 86 years for her crimes.

The 11-hour standoff concluded thanks in large part to the heroism of Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who hurled a chair at the abductor before escaping with fellow hostages. FBI-HRT then entered, neutralizing Akram.

And this is when things got kooky. The FBI’s Dallas division’s special agent in charge, Matthew DeSarno, described the gunman to the press as “singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.” I don’t blame DeSarno (a former colleague) for this disbelieve-your-lying-eyes assessment. He takes his orders from FBI headquarters — in woke times.

Yes, sometimes investigations take time, and we don’t want to release inaccurate information. Yet this was a ground ball. The White House and FBI’s corrected course a day later, allowing that, of course, the Colleyville synagogue hostage-taking was “terrorism-related.” Duh.

The FBI has made a sea change in defining criminal suspects since the Obama administration and its attorney general, Eric Holder, set out to transform the justice system. Post-Obama, law enforcement hesitates to describe criminal suspects’ race for fear of being tagged “racist.”

I was there for the genesis of the FBI’s transformation, when we ceased calling things what they are and began to use nebulous and ambiguous terms so as not to offend.

And my FBI experiences go beyond the tactical realm. I served in mid-level management and was appointed to an acting Senior Executive Service position. That’s the upper echelon of bureau leadership. My final position before I retired in 2016 was the special assistant to the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office. Understand this to be “the last man in the room” when the leader of the FBI’s largest field division made critical decisions.

Here I was a party to FBI headquarters’ directives: Per Holder’s Department of Justice, “radical Islamist terror” was hereafter to be referred to as indefinite cases of “combating violent extremism.” This generic term didn’t align with what we knew of investigations into the San Bernardino terror attack and the Pulse nightclub massacre.

And while we were dealing with a multitude of lone-wolf radical Islamist inspired or directed terror cases, we were directed to place more of our finite resources into domestic terror. The media helped distort the narrative.

And so it goes today. The FBI’s laughable early determination, threading the needle, that a hostage-taker in a synagogue on the Sabbath demanding release of a Pakistani terrorist was “singularly focused on one issue” defies credulity.

How could the FBI be uncertain that this targeting was “specially related to the Jewish community” — after identifying the suspect and hearing his demands? It is less an embarrassment than a dangerous refusal to call things exactly what they are. That’s what justice demands — acting bereft of fear or favor. That used to be the FBI I served.

The Biden DOJ declares that parents complaining about curriculum and masking policies are “domestic terrorists.” Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe — who served under me in the FBI’s New York office — recently warned of those same parents and suggested on a David Axelrod podcast that the DOJ needs to target “mainstream conservatives.”

The FBI is at a crossroads. While the agency is seeing drops in its favorability ratings, the vast majority of its agents and professional support employees continue to toil in obscurity and work damn hard to keep Americans safe. We need them.

What occurred in Colleyville illustrates the problem. Kudos to the FBI-HRT and all who worked to free the synagogue hostages. As for the FBI senior executives who made a mockery of the obvious: Call things what they are. Stand up to those who disingenuously employ definitional distortions. I am tired of apologizing. Make us proud again, FBI.

James A. Gagliano is a retired FBI supervisory special agent and doctoral candidate in homeland security at St. John’s University.