‘Deadly Dangerous!’ CNN’s McCabe Rips Trump For ‘Targeting Messages’ Against Biden and Others Amid ‘MAGA Trumper’ Shooting By FBI
CNN analyst and former FBI chief Andrew McCabe ripped ex-President Donald Trump’s “targeting” language in the wake of an FBI shooting of a Trump fan who made threats against President Joe Biden and others.
A Utah man named Craig Robertson was shot and killed Wednesday when FBI agents tried to serve an arrest warrant over alleged threats to Biden, as well as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, guest host John King drew a line — if indirectly — between Trump’s rhetoric and the slain self-described “MAGA Trumper,” and asked how law enforcement deals with that:
KING: So help us understand help law enforcement deals with this. Nobody is directly tying the former president to this, but in the charging documents, the FBI does include one thread posted online in which the man here refers himself to as a “MAGA Trumper.”
And you can’t ignore the overlap of the people he was threatening with people the former president has gone after in speeches in his own online posts. Number one, how do you connect the dots, I guess, between free speech and potential threats? And what does law enforcement do about that?
MCCABE: It’s really hard, John.
They are in such a tough spot now. The FBI, DHS, other law enforcement entities, they are monitoring all kinds of extremist rhetoric, threatening rhetoric online every single day. Their job is to figure out who is an actual threat, and who are the rest of the people who are just boasting or chest pounding or whatever they’re doing online, and that is not an exact science. It is something that they literally have to monitor every day.
Now, we’ll also say that this is a perfect example of a case that shows how responsible careful political leaders of both parties are very careful not to engage in this sort of violent rhetoric and targeting speech that we hear from Donald Trump very frequently.
And the reason is that the most extreme supporters of those political leaders and certainly those who follow Donald Trump, we have seen will actually follow through on some of these comments.
We know that from the January 6 people who showed up on the Capitol on January 6, many of them said, we came because Donald Trump told us, so this person is a perfect example of what happens when someone like Donald Trump encourages sort of rhetoric, targets people online.
Some of his most extreme supporters get that targeting message and they are prepared to act upon it and that is deadly dangerous.
Watch above via Anderson Cooper 360.
