In the early stages of event unfolding, a truck plowed through a crowd of New Year’s revealers, followed by a police shootout with the driver. And one of the heads of the New Orleans FBI was at first clear and firm: This was NO terrorist attack.
In the same press conference though, the Mayor of New Orleans declared otherwise. And now days later, the FBI has changed its tune, since the details came publicly to light: a Muslim former U.S. Army soldier radicalized for Jihad, who fashioned explosives and carried a gun, and who adorned the subject truck in an ISIS-style battle flag — killed 15 people and injured many more on a crowded public street during a highly televised, worldwide holiday. These facts undoubtedly fit the textbook term for terrorism by way of a mass casualty attack.
Details since have evolved far beyond — now with queries on whether the attack was related to a separate Cybertruck bombing outside a Trump-branded hotel in Las Vegas the same day, by a soldier from the same U.S. Army base as the New Orleans attacker, with both the subject vehicles procured through the same, new car-rental app. But two opposing questions remain: Why did the New Orleans FBI lie to America? And if they didn’t, why was the world’s most elite investigative agency at first so very, very wrong?
Having served as both a journalist (daily news print media) and in law enforcement (police and DEA), I’ve come to know that the frustratingly succinct and factual answers to such media queries should have been all we got: This is an ongoing investigation. Details are still emerging. Right now, we know a vehicle struck multiple pedestrians and the driver was killed in a shootout with responding police. We are investigating all possible motives, and will expand the scope of investigation as additional details emerge.
That’s it.
State established facts, briefly. Everything else is early-stage and ongoing. No conjecture. And no lies. Nothing to walk back in this devastating, fluid situation. But details beget details, and these added up to terrorism on U.S. soil, and squarely within the remaining days of Joe Biden’s already unfavorable, outgoing presidential administration.
The FBI will invariably blame ineptitude. Government is replete with it. Bureaucracy. The poorly executed abundance-of-caution. Conflicting intel sources in a chaotic scene. Take your pick of plausible, aimless blame.
Plus, there hardly ever is accountability beyond a scolding, suspension, or demotion — if anything at all. Look no further than the FBI’s own FISA court abuses, where factual “inaccuracies” (most flattering term possible) were allowed to persist uncorrected through multiple iterations of special wiretap applications, under oath, intended to thwart the most dire of crimes perpetrated by the most ruthless of our national enemies — but channeled instead, erroneously, at Donald Trump’s campaign personnel in the run up to the 2016 presidential election.
Cast ineptitude aside. For the New Orleans attack, it’s more likely that the FBI tried floating “any motive but terrorism” to cast doubt on just THAT — long enough for Biden’s administration to close up shop. Punt on terror for the next 20 days. Then, it would simply become Trump’s mess to deal with. Keep that balloon afloat but ready to burst, once Republican appointees — especially MAGA firebrands like Kash Patel — take the reigns at FBI, DOJ, and National Intelligence.
The only way “terrorism” would have possibly worked politically for Biden was for it to somehow have been down-home, domestic, white supremacy. Which it wasn’t. Or better yet, redneck MAGA rage. Which it wasn’t either. So, onto the lies.
Clearly, this has become just another one of Biden’s navel gazing, steaming dogpile messes. His legacy all but becomes defined by it. While Biden’s administration fostered and fussed about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) — bad people planned evil deeds. Meanwhile, Biden’s FBI fixated on political enemies — embodied in the Mar-a-Lago raid that extended (literally) to former First Lady Melania Trump’s lingerie drawer in search of National Archive documents — while domestic and foreign assassins plotted to kill Donald Trump himself, and terrorists prepped to harm Americans in mass casualty attacks.
And it’s too bad. All it cost was public safety, and the public’s faith in the world’s premier law enforcement agency. No one trusts the FBI anymore. They’re left to dodder in a cruel clown show — ridiculously more so than even the embattled Secret Service.
The ends — according to Democrats — have always justified the means. And it served their needs. Except when the ends were not achieved. Then, like now, the jig is up. The party’s over. And the piles of lies and falsehoods give way to their own obesity. So here we are, onto a course correction that’s overdue and much in need. Enter the change-makers to make the needed change with the incoming Trump administration. After New Orleans, and the latest apparent lie the FBI couldn’t help in making, the need for change — to restore trust in a once-great agency — is ever more apparent.
Jason James Barry is an award-winning essayist and journalist, and author of the police-life memoir, “The Midnight Coffee Club: A Memoir of Grit, Glimmers, and the Pull of Police Life.” Previously, Jason served as a police officer in Connecticut and as a Special Agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
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