Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Monday on Fox News that he believes the FBI is “afraid” of President-elect Donald Trump and members of his incoming administration due to the possibility that they’ll “re-examine” that agency’s investigations.
Over the last year, the FBI has received massive pushback over its security lapses, with Trump nominating Kash Patel as the agency’s new director. If Patel is confirmed then that would end current FBI Director Christopher Wray’s term early. On “The Ingraham Angle,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham questioned Hanson about the agency releasing new footage, four years after the incident, of the suspect accused of placing pipe bombs in Washington, D.C.
“I think they’re afraid the narrative changed over the four years, and they were afraid to release any information during the election. Now they feel that there’s a new administration and there might be some exposure or culpability. They’re afraid that if they were Donald Trump and they had suffered what they did to him, they would be very frightened the way they think,” Hanson said. “So they think Donald Trump is going to re-examine a lot of this. ”
The new video published by the FBI Washington Field Office shows the suspect appearing to plant a bomb near the Democratic National Committee.
Hanson went on to call out what he said were the FBI’s “lies,” highlighting the neglect to immediately release Lt. Michael Byrd’s identity after fatally shooting Ashli Babbitt during the Jan. 6 riot. The senior fellow additionally cited the number of charges brought against attendees of the Jan. 6 attack compared to those not charged during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots.
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“A lot of the things they said, Laura, were abject lies,” Hanson said. “There were not four officers killed. There were not 10 people killed. There was only one violent death, we think, and that was a Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt. Then there was no need to hide Officer Byrd’s identity. Anytime an officer lethally shoots an unarmed person in this country, they’re identified. For some reason, they wanted to suppress that.”
“They wanted to suppress the FBI video. They wanted to suppress the information about Liz Cheney, maybe witness tampering, that’s alleged,” Hanson said. “They wanted to suppress some of the erosion of the evidence. They didn’t tell us how many people were charged. It ended up [with] 1,500 felony charges. It was [an] almost 75% conviction rate. That never happens. Compare that with the 14,000 people that were arrested in 2020. Almost 90% of them were never charged or indicted. They were released. So there was a lot of things that they want to suppress.”
In 2020, BLM was linked to nine in 10 riots. The country experienced 637 riots between May 26, 2020, and September 12, 2020, according to a study conducted by a joint project of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University called the U.S. Crisis Monitor. While thousands were arrested in various states, the U.S. Department of Justice released a statement on Sept. 24, 2020 saying that 300 people in 29 states and Washington, D.C., were charged with federal crimes.
Despite Democrats like Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar saying the FBI is already “very functional,” the agency has faced questions from Republicans and other pundits regarding its guidance over the years. The agency, for instance, received major backlash for only offering limited cooperation following the first assassination attempt against Trump on July 13, 2024.
Just one day into the new year, the FBI had flip-flopped on multiple claims concerning the terrorist attack in New Orleans, which killed at least 14 people and injured dozens of others. In a press conference the day after the attack, FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Aletha Duncan told reporters that the attack was “not a terrorist event.” Her statement, however, was disregarded fewer than five minutes later when New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell addressed the press to say that the incident was a terrorist attack.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News/”The Ingraham Angle”)
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