During Deadline: White House’s breaking news coverage of Wednesday’s shooting at Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA event at Utah Valley University, where Kirk himself was fatally shot, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian suggested that the FBI’s redistribution of manpower away from domestic terrorism towards illegal immigration may have played a role.
Dilanian couldn’t help himself and turned the on-air discussion towards illegal immigration:
But it is absolutely the case, and I've been reporting on this from around the country, that FBI agents who have been working on domestic terrorism issues over the past several years, many of them have been reassigned to-to go on immigration roundups, to do immigration enforcement activities. Some full time and some part time. But in both cases, it takes time away from the cases that they have been working against those extremist groups that Chris [O’Leary] was talking about.
The federal government’s shakeups of personal across several agencies were notable, but don’t necessarily account for an isolated event, one where the details weren’t entirely yet known.
Dilanain apparently found it appropriate to question the choices of those in charge of domestic terror prevention by downplaying the importance of illegal immigration enforcement:
And again, we can't say whether there was any chance to have stopped this attack today. But it comes in a context where the FBI—which is the agency we rely on to stop extremist violence and domestic terror attacks—is being asked to do things it's never been asked to do before, including go help ice round up nannies and gardeners who are in the country illegally, and also in places like Washington, D.C., go on violent crime patrols that is normally the purview of the local police. And it's something we should all keep in mind. And we should be asking our leaders hard questions about those priorities and what the FBI is doing when it comes to domestic terrorism.
The FBI was responsible for domestic protection and investigation, which reasonably includes illegal immigrants who have breached past the borders. Charlie Kirk was a high profile figure, but was not a public official subject to ongoing federal protection.
Deadline anchor Nicole Wallace blamed the lack of resources devoted to tracking digital traces of potential terror activity on “democracy,” implying voters had chosen for this change in FBI priorities directly:
I mean, that even if resources hadn't been diverted, what Chris is describing is a complete reorientation from the post 9/11 threat environment, which was largely foreign and largely adhered to an ideology of Al Qaeda followed by ISIS. There were means to track online. There was an ideology people adhered to. The laws, and the tools are so much less for tracking domestic threats as a result of-of the fact that we live in a democracy.
Wallace’s words suggest that voters’ choices were responsible for the lack of stopping an act of political violence.
Dilanian confusingly gave the FBI the benefit of the doubt while simultaneously placing the expectation that the agency could have potentially caught the perpetrator prior to the shooting:
And if it turns out that this person who carried out this attack had been posting angry and deranged things on social media, that doesn't necessarily mean that the FBI or some other law enforcement organization should have stopped it, should have known that he was tending towards violence. But there is—there are examples around the country, there have been many cases where the FBI has stopped attacks from violent extremists before they happen, has caught people planning and scheming to carry out politically motivated violence or nihilist motivated violence. And domestic terrorism squads are in many field offices, FBI field offices across the country working these cases.
The wishy-washy commentary attempts to straddle a line between fair analysis and outright accusations during an active story.
Again, Dilanian questioned the prudence of federal authorities by looping an un-related, large-scope national story into the middle of a tragedy:
And to the extent that they're doing less of that in a climate where the threat is more complex and more dangerous than ever, we all need to ask whether that's a smart idea, whether that's a smart allocation of resources, whether we want FBI agents who are expert in counterterrorism to be going on immigration roundups.
In the midst of a sudden tragic event, MSNBC audaciously connected the story to another national focus in a completely partisan manner.
