‘Baffled’: NBC Reporter Says Ex-Officials Stunned Pam Bondi Disbanded DOJ Task Force Combating China And Russia

MSNBC anchor Ana Cabrera spoke to NBC News Justice and Intelligence Correspondent Ken Dilanian on Friday about the latest moves made by Trump’s new attorney general at the Department of Justice.

“One of the first things Pam Bondi did as attorney general she’d just sworn in this week was halt the Justice Department’s efforts to combat foreign political interference. What do we know about that?” Cabrera asked.

“She disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was created in 2017 by the Trump administration in the wake of Russian election interference. And it’s been working furiously ever since to try to identify and call out and counter manipulation on social media and elsewhere by Russia and China and Iran,” Dilanian explained, adding:

And people I’m talking to are baffled by the decision to shut this thing down. In her directive body said that it could be used for weaponization. We know that conservatives were very upset that the FBI went to Facebook and Google and other social media companies and flagged foreign disinformation, some of which was right-wing rhetoric.

They called that an impingement on free speech. She also restricted enforcement of the Foreign Lobbying Registration Act, which has prosecuted some Trump allies over the years. So these are big, momentous moves that Bondi made on her first day in office. Ana.

Dilanian added some further context for the surprise moves from Bondi in his Thursday report on the topic, reporting:

David Laufman, who headed the DOJ’s counterintelligence section in the Obama administration, said the order “raises serious questions about the new attorney general’s commitment to criminal enforcement when appropriate under longstanding law, as well as her commitment overall to combatting malign foreign influence operations in the United States.”

The first FBI director Trump appointed, Christopher Wray, long warned about the dangers of covert foreign influence campaigns, saying they were often designed to deepen American political divisions.

“The Chinese government is engaged in a broad, diverse campaign of theft and malign influence, and it can execute that campaign with authoritarian efficiency,” Wray said in 2021.

Watch the full clip above.