Americans awakened on New Year’s morning not to news coverage of celebratory parades but to one of its cities in mourning after a terror attack. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar drove a pick-up truck through a crowd on iconic Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring more.
It was not at first called a terrorist attack by FBI personnel, only to find the Bureau quickly backtrack and correct itself.
It was confusion that was not surprising and an attack that could have been avoided, Hedieh Mirahmadi Falco, a former FBI senior advisor, said on Washington Watch Thursday.
The root of the problem, according to Falco, is lost focus – and it connects with President Donald Trump’s announcement this week that he’s creating a task force to combat anti-Christian bias within the government.
“The previous Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses. The Biden Department of Justice sought to squelch faith in the public square,” the Executive Order states.
Falco, a Christian convert from Islam who spent more than 20 years as a federal contractor, confirms the bias as an eyewitness to it. She says a gradual shift of focus within the FBI – some of which involves Trump’s first administration – has left America vulnerable to mass terrorist attacks.
“We were building terrorism prevention programs to be to the left of boom, which means we wanted to get ahead of a terrorist attack,” she shared.
This was taking place during Barack Obama’s administration under the heading “Countering Violent Extremism.” The focus was on Islamic groups, but the Bureau didn’t want to name Islam and deal with community backlash, she revealed.
The program shut down when Trump took office in 2017 with the focus shifting to Russia and investigations into its interference in the U.S. election and also potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
When Trump lost in 2020 and Biden took over in 2021, the Bureau's focus moved further from Islamic terrorism, becoming centered on the January 6 investigations.
“So they open all these cases – all these cases, all the guardian leads and investigations on grandmothers and people who were strolling by the Capitol – and that led to the uptick of what they describe now as radically motivated, violent extremists, which is basically white Christians. A lot of them are not white, but they’re basically Christians, conservatives,” Falco explained.
The entire department shifted to that focus. The threat became Americans practicing their religious liberty and engaged in all kinds of activity.
The next focus: Praying grandmothers
The shift had moved from radical Islam to pro-life protestors outside of abortion clinics.
The Biden administration brought federal criminal charges resulting in numerous multi-year prison sentences against nearly two dozen peaceful pro-life Christians praying and demonstrating outside abortion facilities, the Executive Order states.
Two of the arrests involved men and women of 73 years and older. Another involved a father of 11 children.
“They were arrested 18 months after praying and singing hymns outside an abortion facility in Tennessee as part of a politically motivated prosecution,” the EO states.
The event in question involved pro-life activists ranging from the elderly to young children walking into an abortion clinic and also blocking access to it by sitting in front of the door, The National Catholic Register reported. Eighty-seven-year-old Eva Edl, of Aiken, South Carolina, and all others have since been pardoned by Trump.
At the same time, acts of violence, theft and arson – at least 100 – perpetrated against Catholic churches, charities and pro-life centers went ignored by the Department of Justice, according to the EO. The FBI also circulated a memo describing “radical-traditionalist” Catholics as domestic terror threats and suggested the infiltration of Catholic churches as “threat mitigation.” The memo was later retracted.
“The stated purpose was to prevent them from advancing their goals and their ideas,” Falco stated.
This was illustrated to Bureau personnel with a graphic that included the names of prominent Christian organizations at the bottom of a pyramid that bloomed to include groups like the Ku Klux Klan, she added.
“The FBI is run like a paramilitary organization and takes its marching orders from the Department of Justice. Nobody said anything about this, and millions of dollars went to these kinds of programs,” she said. “When that mission shift occurs, the leadership is responsible to implement it. There are people who implemented programs against American citizens, against Christians.”
While FBI targets Christians, terror takes place
The shift in focus came with a price. The anti-terror program Falco was hired to build was shut down, its resources redistributed.
Hers was a program designed to identify in advance individuals like Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, one whose behavior had been reported a dozen times, Falco said.
“There should have been intervention programs in place, multidisciplinary teams that would have intervened, knocked on the door, said, ‘Hey, what's going on? What's the problem?’ and basically been able to put him under investigation to realize that we need to worry about the threat of violence,” Falco said.
