FBI boss: Russia is targeting Joe Biden

Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, warned a House committee yesterday that Russia is actively pursuing a disinformation campaign against former Vice-President Joe Biden and expressed alarm about violent extremist groups.

“Racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, has made up a majority of domestic terrorism threats, Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee. He also echoed an intelligence community assessment that Russia is conducting a “very active” campaign to spread disinformation and interfere in the presidential election, with Biden as the primary target.

“We certainly have seen very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” Wray said, specifically “to both sow divisiveness and discord and, I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, primarily to denigrate VicePresident Biden in what the Russians see as a kind of an anti-Russian establishment”.

Wray’s comments were the latest example of a top national security official contradicting President Donald Trump’s downplaying of Russian election interference.

A Homeland Security official has accused the Trump Administration of soft-pedaling Russian and white supremacist threats because they make “the President look bad”.

Wray condemned all acts of bloodshed but refrained from overemphasising violence caused by farleft groups like Antifa, the loose movement that resists facism and other forms of extreme right-wing ideology. Trump and Attorney General William Barr have repeatedly blamed Antifa for unrest in US cities.

While some claiming affiliation with Antifa have committed violent acts, racist extremists have been the more lethal threat in recent years, Wray said.

Democrats pressed him on whether the Administration was focusing enough on armed militias and white supremacists, while Republicans expressed similar concerns about Antifa, which Wray described as an “ideology or movement” rather than an organisation.

Wray said the FBI averaged roughly 1000 domestic terrorism investigations annually and had recorded about 120 arrests on domestic terrorism suspicions this year. But he made it clear that white supremacist and anti-government groups were the primary threats.

In particular, neo-Nazi groups such as Atomwaffen Division and the Base have drawn the attention of the FBI, which has arrested violent members of those organisations.

White supremacists have carried out the most lethal attacks on US soil in recent years.

Wray’s descriptions of Russian interference and white supremacist efforts echoed a draft of a Homeland Security threat assessment that a whistleblower said department leaders had blocked.

Brian Murphy, the former head of the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence branch, filed a complaint with the House Intelligence Committee asserting that acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Kenneth Cuccinelli blocked the release of the annual assessment because of how portions on white supremacist extremism and Russian interference would reflect on Trump.

Murphy accused Homeland Security Department leaders of directing analysts to highlight threats posed by China and Iran. Those nations have targeted Trump but do not pose as much of an immediate threat to the US as Russia, intelligence officials have said.

The complaint prompted the House committee to expand its inquiry into the department’s intelligence gathering, but department leaders are resisting.