Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican moderate, described attacks by party members as both “absurd” and “dangerous”, after a week in which certain Republicans have compared the FBI to the Gestapo and fundraised off the slogan: “Defund the FBI”. Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Hogan described the comparisons of the FBI to Nazi Germany’s secret police, made by Florida senator Rick Scott, as “very concerning to me, it’s outrageous rhetoric”. He added: “It’s absurd and, you know, it’s dangerous,” especially after an armed man enraged by the raid was killed in Ohio when he tried to invade an FBI office. “There are threats all over the place and losing faith in our federal law enforcement officers and our justice system is a really serious problem for the country.”
Hogan’s comments were followed by remarks from Arkansas’s Republican governor Asa Hutchinson, who appeared on CNN on Sunday and partially mirrored his Maryland counterpart. “If the GOP is going to be the party of supporting law enforcement, law enforcement includes the FBI,” Hutchinson, a former US prosecutor and private practice attorney, said. He added: “We need to pull back on casting judgment on them. … No doubt that higher ups in the FBI have made mistakes, they do it, I’ve defended cases as well, and I’ve seen wrong actions. But we cannot say that whenever they [FBI officers] went in and did that search that they were not doing their job as law enforcement officers.”
The Republican congresswoman from Wyoming Liz Cheney, a ranking member on the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the US capitol, has condemned her colleagues’ rhetoric as “sickening”. “I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search,” Cheney wrote on Thursday. “These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk.” Her stance is slowly being mirrored by other House Republicans after the warrant was made public on Friday.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... s-rhetoric
Law enforcement agencies are warning of “an increase in threats and acts of violence” directed at FBI personnel after agents executed a search warrant of former President Donald Trump’s home. Alongside the Department of Homeland Security, the bureau issued a joint intelligence bulletin on Friday describing an “unprecedented” number of such threats posed at government officials, POLITICO confirmed. The bulletin said the threats were “occurring primarily online and across multiple platforms,” and that some were specific in identifying proposed targets and tactics, as well as weaponry.
The bulletin comes as Trump and his allies have attacked the FBI for what they say are political motivations and underhandedness in going into his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Florida, to retrieve what they have detailed as documents containing classified information. Among the accusations made, without evidence, have been that FBI agents planted documents and took orders from the Biden administration to smear the former president.
Pro-Trump internet forums have erupted with violent threats in the days after the FBI search. Meanwhile, conservative media published the names of the two agents who signed the paperwork authorizing a search warrant of Trump’s estate. And the biographical information of the federal magistrate judge who signed the search warrant had to be wiped from a Florida court’s website because of threats.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/1 ... h-00051597
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