BY ABIGAIL TRACY
NOVEMBER 2, 2018 8:38 AM
... an attorney representing .. one of three men convicted of plotting to bomb Somali refugees, filed an explosive memo in U.S. District Court in Kansas. Stein, his lawyer argued, should receive a more lenient sentence because he was inspired by then-candidate Donald Trump. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful, and contentious presidential elections in modern history,” attorney Jim Pratt wrote, “driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president” ...
... Trump and his allies have argued that the president bears no responsibility for the acts of deranged individuals. But to many experts on hate groups and former Homeland Security, law enforcement, and counterterrorism officials, there is unquestionably a correlation. “I think it’s laughable that people are trying to separate the two things in saying there is no relationship between what the president urges his supporters to do and what his supporters then do,” Glenn Kirschner, a former federal homicide prosecutor, told me. “A fourth-grader could see the connection. . . . Anybody who says there is no connection, I think is saying it for political or ideological reasons” ...
... Even before Trump took office, his presidential transition team began drawing up plans to redirect national-security resources away from white supremacists to focus solely on Islamic terrorism. The main target of this effort was Countering Violent Extremism, an interagency task force created by Barack Obama in the wake of the Charleston Church shooting to help prevent acts of violence before they happen. In 2016, the Office of Community Partnerships, which housed C.V.E., boasted a full-time staff of 16, about 25 contractors, and a budget of $21 million. But the Trump White House was skeptical of the preventative approach. While the Anti-Defamation League estimates that white supremacists have committed 83 percent of extremist-related murders in the U.S. over the past decade, the administration wanted to keep the focus on radical Islamist groups. In 2018, the Office of Community Partnerships’ budget was slashed to less than $3 million and its headcount cut to eight. “Effectively, it no longer exists,” a former D.H.S. official told me, describing a “shift” away from “a comprehensive approach” to preventing radicalization and recruitment ...
Other sources I spoke with specifically identified Katharine Gorka, the wife of former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, as a driving figure behind efforts to de-prioritize white supremacist violence. Although Mr. Gorka was forced out of the White House in August 2017, Mrs. Gorka remains a full-time adviser for Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, where she has reportedly played a critical role in shaping the administration’s counterterrorism agenda, including drafting reports to Congress on terrorism recruitment ...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/trump-administration-tree-of-life-shooting-domestic-terrorism
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