SCOOP: Warnings from DNI Gabbard and NCTC Director Kent about Islamic terror prove tragically accurate in pre-Thanksgiving terror attack
For months, Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Kent have cautioned about the dangers posed by the thousands of unvetted Afghans the Biden administration let into America.
For months, the top leadership at the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has warned of the dangers posed by the thousands of unvetted Afghans President Joe Biden’s administration allowed into America following America’s failed withdrawal in August 2021.
Hours before Thanksgiving, warnings from DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard and from Joe Kent, the Director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), proved tragically prescient, when an Afghan national let into America under the Biden administration allegedly shot two National Guardsmen just blocks from the White House.
“American citizens inside our own borders and U.S. military personnel stationed abroad face a growing, not diminishing, terrorist threat,” Kent cautioned months ago. “Terrorists across continents and ideologies are now more energized than they have been years.”
Gabbard, a fierce opponent of “Islamist terrorism,” who reoriented the DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment on “direct threats to American safety,” not on climate change earlier this year, told the Washington Reporter during an interview in New Delhi earlier this year that the Trump administration had to start from scratch on a lot of counterterrorism measures following four years of the Biden administration.
“There was no groundwork done, because there was not a commitment to actually do the work,” Gabbard told the Reporter about the lack of investigation into the August 2021 Abbey Gate suicide attack. “The travesty came amidst this failed withdrawal from Afghanistan. It didn’t surprise me that there was no groundwork done, because we had an administration, both from the top with President Biden, but also the leaders that he had in charge of this epic failure, that refused to take responsibility for it in and of itself. So it didn’t surprise me then that they also refused to actually do the work necessary to go after the terrorists who are responsible for that bombing.”
Gabbard’s focus on counterterrorism has continued through the runup of the terror attack by the White House; she said days before that “there were a lot of people who came into our country over the last four years who either are known or suspected terrorists or who have ties to them. I’m concerned about the folks that we don’t know about, that we’ve not that have not been identified or vetted.”
Despite the lack of preparation by her predecessors in the Biden administration, Gabbard said that “we, under this administration, working closely with the FBI, NCTC and other law enforcement partners, forwarded some of these lone wolf actors who in some cases are becoming harder to find because they are by definition, the lone wolf actor… [and how] Al-Qaeda is ramping up their efforts, their focus continues to be on launching an attack against the United States.”
In addition to lone wolf actors and Al-Qaeda terrorists, Gabbard also laid out that her concerns include “ISIS and these other Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations, all of who really abide by this same is in this ideology attempting to not only plan attacks against the United States, but really their ultimate goal is to undermine our Constitution, undermine our freedom, our democratic republic, and install their own Islamist caliphate and rule over everyone based on their Sharia law.”
Gabbard, herself a decorated military veteran, added that “unfortunately, a lot of politicians [are] too afraid to speak the truth about this because they are afraid of the political backlash that they may get being called Islamaphobes and so forth; they watch what happened to me. But this has come at the cost of our own security and, and the threat to our freedom.”
As DNI, Gabbard has carried out President Donald Trump’s counterterrorism mandate from the beginning. During his Cabinet meeting on his hundredth day in office, she told the president that “because of your designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, I took immediate action with our National Counterterrorism Center to prioritize their focus on those terrorists and gang members who are trying to enter our country, through legal or illegal means, and to seek out those who are already here in our country because of the Biden administration’s four years of open borders.”
“We’ve been working very closely with your great Attorney General’s team at the DEA to get these known cartels into our systems, to be able to stop them at the border, and turning over names to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to be able to find those who are already here in our country,” Gabbard continued, citing several high-profile successes that she presided over. “Just the other day, we found 700 alien terrorists who have ties to MS-13, Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa cartel. Just yesterday, our NCTC identified almost 600 individuals with ties to other terrorists, who came through our borders illegally, claimed asylum, and under the Biden administration were paroled here within our borders.”
That NCTC, helmed by Kent — who is also a combat veteran — has honed in on Afghans who were admitted into America under Biden. Kent laid out that the “NCTC has done their job and they’ve identified over 1,400 of these Afghans as having ties to ISIS and other terrorist groups. Yet, Biden let them into the interior of the United States. Same thing with a bunch of ISIS affiliated Tajiks and Uzbeks who came into the United States of America as well. There’s around 600 of them that were also identified by NCTC that are here in America right now because the Biden administration has allowed them to stay inside of our country.”
The problem isn’t just hypothetical, as Kent has laid out for months. “Just last October, an Afghan man was arrested in Oklahoma for plotting to carry out an attack on behalf of ISIS on election day. He, like many other Afghans, came to the United States following the Biden administration’s debacle of a withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Kent said. “This is just one terrorist we were able to stop. The professionals of the NCTC identified over a thousand Afghan refugees that had ties to terrorists that the Biden administration let into our nation.”