FBI is failing to tackle white supremacism, says ex-agent

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is failing to address the rising scourge of white supremacist violence despite stark warnings that such attacks pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the US, a leading authority on law enforcement has said.

- Ed Pilkington

Michael German, a former FBI special agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups in the 1990s, said the bureau continues to underplay the scope of the threat. As a result, communities targeted by white supremacists and far-right militia groups – such as the largely African American neighbourhood of Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were killed by a suspected racist gunman last week – are left fatally exposed.

“US law enforcement is failing, as it long has, to provide victimi sed communities like Buffalo’s with equal protection under the law. They are not actually investigating the crimes that occur,” said German, a fellow with the Brennan Center at New York University School of Law .

Saturday’s mass shooting in Buffalo was allegedly carried out by a white gunman who selected the Tops supermarket because it served one of the largest black populations in the state. In a 180-page diatribe he is believed to have posted online, he espoused the false racist belief that white Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants of colour.

Numerous recent studies have pinpointed white supremacy as the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the US today. The FBI has sounded the alarm, with its former director Christopher Wray telling Congress in 2020 that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists” were the main source of ideological killings, superseding jihadists.