FBI Director Says Most Domestic Terrorism Arrests Are Related To White Supremacy

FBI Director Christopher Wray said the agency has made about 100 domestic terrorism arrests and the majority of them were related to white supremacy.

On Tuesday, Wray spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and while there, he revealed that in the 100 arrests the agency has made since October, the majority of them were motivated by white nationalism or white terrorism.  ”I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence, but it does include other things as well,” Wray said during the hearing, referring to the fiscal 2019 year, which began Oct. 1.

According to The Hill, the FBI is “aggressively” investigating domestic terrorism and hate crimes, Wray said noting that the bureau is focused on investigating the violence, not the ideology motivating the attacks. CNN recently reported that the increase of white supremacist-related incidents from 2017 to 2018 was increased by 182 percent. In addition, every terrorist murder carried out in the United States in 2018 was carried out by a white nationalist or white supremacist, not by an Islamist, like what is often reported.

During the hearing, Wray defined the difference between the term homegrown violent extremism, a word Wray says the agency uses to refer to people in the States who are commit crimes that are inspired by jihadists. Domestic terrorism, Wray explained, are crimes that are racially-motivated by extremists, anarchists, and others. The numbers of domestic terrorist attacks are greatly similar to the amount of international terrorism cases. Wray also listed the recent domestic terrorism attacks in the last couple of years. The director said #DonaldTrump isn’t taking the issue seriously.

“There is a concern that this is not being taken as seriously as it should be as one of the real threats in our country,” Durbin said while raising questions about the FBI’s shift to using the new category of “racially-motivated violent extremism” to describe race-related crimes. “We take domestic terrorism or hate crime — regardless of ideology — extremely seriously, I can assure you, and we are aggressively pursuing it using both counterterrorism resources and criminal investigative resources and partnering closely with our state and local partners,” Wray said.