KERRY PICKET: Rank-and-file FBI agents dismayed, ‘embarrassed’ by bureau’s handling of New Orleans terror attack.
FBI agents say the bureau’s first response to the New Year’s Day terrorist massacre in New Orleans’ French Quarter was disastrous and another reason why the Senate can’t move fast enough to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the agency.
According to several agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the FBI failed to execute a comprehensive counter-terrorism plan when Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar of Texas, an Army veteran, rammed a pickup truck with an ISIS flag into New Year’s Eve revelers, killing 14 and wounding dozens.
They said the top FBI official on the scene broke with bureau decorum and inexplicably declared the attack not to be terrorism and that the bureau failed to follow basic procedures during the investigation.
Agents wondered why Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans FBI office, did not appear to be on duty when the attack happened, despite what should have been a heightened alert for a major New Year’s Eve celebrations and the college football championship, the Sugar Bowl, scheduled at the city’s Superdome on New Year’s Day.
The agents blamed poor leadership by outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate.
Mr. Abbate is poised to become acting director after Mr. Wray resigns, which he said he will do before Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
“They need to go right now, not only Wray, but Abbate needs to go. This is awful. This is embarrassing. Kash Patel is the person to have in there,” an agent said, referring to Mr. Trump’s nominee for FBI director. “He needs to come right now, right away, because these people have to leave.”
Indeed. As Byron York wrote a couple of weeks ago: Kash Patel, onetime FBI target, now on track to run the FBI.
Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”
It’s a common criticism in anti-Trump circles. But it raises a question. Where were these people in 2017, 2018, and after? If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies?
During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following:
1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates.
2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.
3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.
4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.
5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.
6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.
7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.
8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.
9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.
10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.
The FBI’s response to Patel’s arrival should be fun to watch:
