FBI Director James Comey Still Unsure If White Supremacist’s Attack In Charleston Was Terrorism

WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey said Thursday he’s still not sure whether the killings of nine African-Americans inside a church in South Carolina last month meets the legal def­i­n­i­tion of terrorism.

The FBI defines ter­ror­ism as “the unlaw­ful use of force or vio­lence against per­sons or prop­er­ty to intim­i­date or coerce a gov­ern­ment, the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, or any seg­ment there­of in fur­ther­ance of polit­i­cal or social objec­tives.” Dylann Roof, 21, who is charged in the fatal shoot­ings of nine peo­ple dur­ing a prayer ser­vice at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in down­town Charleston, appar­ent­ly wrote aracist man­i­festo say­ing he want­ed to “pro­tect the White race” and had “no choice” but to kill inno­cent worshipers.

“I am not in the posi­tion to, alone, go into the ghet­to and fight,” the man­i­festo says. “I chose Charleston because it is most his­toric city in my state, and at one time had the high­est ratio of blacks to Whites in the coun­try. We have no skin­heads, no real KKK, no one doing any­thing but talk­ing on the inter­net. Well some­one has to have the brav­ery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

“I don’t know yet,” Comey said Thursday, when The Huffington Post asked him whether the Charleston shoot­ing was an act of ter­ror­ism. “I was asked about that a day or so after and said that, based on what I knew at that point, I did­n’t see it fit­ting the def­i­n­i­tion. Since then, we’re found the so-called man­i­festo online, so I know the inves­ti­ga­tors and pros­e­cu­tors are look­ing at it through the lens of hate crime, through the lens, poten­tial­ly, of terrorism.”

The label “does­n’t impact the ener­gy that we apply to it,” Comey added.

“Given the nature of my busi­ness, I only oper­ate in a legal frame­work,” Comey said. “I know there’s a def­i­n­i­tion of ter­ror­ism that all of us car­ry around as a col­lo­qui­al mat­ter. I know from hav­ing talked to them the inves­ti­ga­tors and pros­e­cu­tors are look­ing at it through a bunch of dif­fer­ent lens­es to fig­ure out what, if any … fed­er­al charges might make sense.”

Comey said inves­ti­ga­tors “work very hard to try to under­stand the facts, and then Justice will fig­ure out what charges to bring. So the answer is I don’t know yet, but I know that our folks will look at it from all angles.”

Comey’s view con­trasts with that of for­mer Attorney General Eric Holder, who told The Huffington Post this week that Charleston was “clear­ly an act of ter­ror­ism.” It was a “polit­i­cal-vio­lent” act, Holder said.

“With a dif­fer­ent set of cir­cum­stances, and if you had dialed in reli­gion there, Islam, that would be called an act of ter­ror,” Holder said. “It seems to me that, again on the basis of the infor­ma­tion that has been released, that’s what we have here. An act of terror.”

The Huffington Post asked Comey whether there would be a hes­i­tan­cy to call the Charleston shoot­ing ter­ror­ism if Roof’s man­i­festo had indi­cat­ed his attack was inspired by the Islamic State.

“I’d inves­ti­gate it I think prob­a­bly just as we’re inves­ti­gat­ing now, to under­stand what his moti­va­tion was and whether it was designed to coerce a civil­ian pop­u­la­tion,” Comey said. “So we’d inves­ti­gate it the same, and then in decid­ing what charges to bring, we’d look at it through the frame­work of the indi­vid­ual statu­to­ry pro­vi­sions to see whether they’d apply.”

Comey object­ed to the sug­ges­tion that there was hes­i­tan­cy to call the Charleston attack ter­ror­ism based on the accused killer’s white suprema­cist views that would­n’t be present if the sus­pect were a Muslim extremist.

“Where’s the hes­i­tan­cy?” Comey asked. “This is where I strug­gle a lit­tle bit. The only world I live in is when you bring charges against some­one and charge them with some­thing under a par­tic­u­lar pro­vi­sion that is a ter­ror­ism statute, and so that’s the frame­work through which I look at it, and I think that makes sense for some­one in the gov­ern­ment who is doing an inves­ti­ga­tion to look at it through that framework.

“So I’m not hes­i­tat­ing to define it in any way, except to say that that we want to gath­er the facts and then find out which statutes make sense,” Comey said. “That would be the same whether his man­i­festo was writ­ten in Arabic or in English.”

Comey also said dur­ing a round­table dis­cus­sion with reporters that he believed the FBI was tak­ing the threat of non-Muslim home­grown extrem­ists — who have killed near­ly twice as many peo­ple with­in the U.S. as Islamic rad­i­cals in the years since Sept. 11 — seriously.

“Within the bureau, we have a pret­ty rig­or­ous process to try and assess threat and press resources against that threat, and I am con­fi­dent that we are putting the resources against both of these threats that make sense,” Comey said. “We try, as you know, to be very care­ful and respect­ful of free speech, but we also try and under­stand when speech cross­es the line of First Amendment-pro­tect­ed activ­i­ty to action or exhort­ing action that is in vio­la­tion of the law.”

Comey said a “whole lot” of FBI ana­lysts and agents “wake up every day” and focus sole­ly on domes­tic groups.

“One of the rea­sons that maybe the ISIL threat gets more atten­tion is that there real­ly isn’t a domes­tic ter­ror­ism threat that pos­es the risk of actors in every state engag­ing in ran­dom, near­ly ran­dom acts of vio­lence coör­di­nat­ed in the way that ISIL is attempt­ing to inspire direct activ­i­ties,” Comey said. “So there isn’t a com­pa­ra­ble threat actor in the domes­tic scene. It’s frag­ment­ed. There’s lots of dif­fer­ent groups that are poten­tial­ly wor­ri­some that we focus on.”