espionage
Calling It: America Just Suffered the First Terror Attack by a Border-Crossing Illegal Alien
From the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
Go ahead Biden and friends, prove me wrong
By refusing repeated chances to simply rule out a terrorism motive for a May 3 truck-breaching attack on the Quantico Marine Corps base, the Biden administration and all involved agencies have essentially confirmed one of America’s worst — and most politically consequential — nightmares related to the ongoing border crisis. A terror attack emanating from an illegal Southwest Border crossing just happened, and since that precedent is now established, more are likely on the way.
In my reasoned opinion, a Jordanian immigrant who illegally crossed the Southwest Border from Mexico finally staged the first known terrorism attack on U.S. soil on May 3 after having accessed the target from the Mexican border.
To date, the government will only confirm the border-crossing Jordanian joined with another illegally present Jordanian, who overstayed a student visa, and together posed as Amazon deliverymen in a large box truck, then tried to plow it through the gates of Quantico, which houses the FBI training academy, military officer training schools, and military criminal investigations and intelligence commands.
Quick-thinking military police thwarted the attack and charged the men with trespassing before turning them over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The government didn’t offer a word about this incident until Potomac Local News’ Kelly Sienkowski initially broke the story and provided the politically explosive elements that one of the Jordanians had crossed the southern border first and that one was on the FBI terrorism watch list.
After I amplified the Potomac Local News story in a May 13 New York Post column demanding to know more, some scattered conservative media outlets, broadcasters, and law-makers joined in the quest for an answer to the main question: Was this a terror attack by a border-crossing extremist? But the administration’s coordinated refusal to address the terrorism aspects led me — and should lead everyone else — to the conclusion that it most definitely was a terror attack by a border-crossing “special interest alien”.
I base my reasoned conclusion that a border-crossing terrorist did finally strike — a fear that has gone unconsummated and often ridiculed since 9/11 — in part on repeated refusals by the White House, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and ICE to address terrorism as the motive.
Consider that since the 9/11 attacks federal authorities and the American people have enjoyed a kind of public compact that now stands broken. It is that the government almost always clarifies to the American public whether its top counterterrorism professionals regard initially ambiguous attacks as motivated by international or domestic terrorism — or not — and often a thumbs up or down as to whether the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating.
But the Biden administration will not engage in this one rare case, a startling break with post-9/11 tradition.
I believe the reason Biden’s people won’t acknowledge the first-ever border-crossing terror attack attempts to serve political aims, at the expense of public safety. They know that acknowledging a terror attack from the border crisis would further damage a Biden re-election campaign that is already suffering dearly from it.
Much recent polling shows the border crisis and its attendant national security fears constitute a major political vulnerability for the Biden re-election campaign for which voters already plan to punish Biden and reward Donald Trump. The border crisis could swing the election already, and now come credible reports that at least one Jordanian border-crosser just tried to ram a huge truck through an important military and law enforcement installation.
Any official acknowledgement that it was done for the global jihad delivers a giant new sledgehammer at the doorstep of Trump’s campaign headquarters.
But more logic undergirds my conclusion that a border-crossing terrorist just struck for the first time due to the border crisis.
It’s that the Biden administration will not rule it out even though doing so would quickly end the political threat to Biden’s reelection. A rule-out would quickly send packing people like me and assure the story can never grow into a Trump sledgehammer. With a simple rule-out, we all just disappear, and columns like this never get written.
I believe the Biden administration won’t rule out terrorism because they know the May 3 attempted truck ramming was a terrorism attack, and officials are not willing to risk impugning themselves by publicly saying otherwise.
In lockstep, the DOD, FBI, and ICE have all refused to rule out terrorism as a motive.
“ICE confirms attack on Quantico; Ignores questions on terrorist threat”, reads the headline on one of Sienkowski’s follow-up report a full 14 days after the terror attack. Fox News’ Doug Doocy got the same response when he asked the ICE commissioner the question. An FBI spokesperson in the northern Virginia field office refused to confirm or deny investigative interest in the matter, Sienkowski told me in a phone interview.
Not even the White House would reap the advantage of an official “terrorism-ruled-out” when Fox News’s Doocy pressed White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if the White House would characterize what happened as a “failed terror attack”.
“Given that it is an active law enforcement matter, I would have to refer you to ICE,” she replied. “I just can’t dive into that, again, because there is a law enforcement matter.”
That dodge is, in my view, as good as confirmation, considering all the circumstances.
Finally, I know this was a terror attack — the first ever by an extremist border-crosser from the Middle East — because Karine Jean-Pierre and all these agencies are in lockstep on the messaging and strategy of neither confirming nor denying or ruling out terrorism. That means a whole lot of high-level talking and coordination went on because … they know it was a terror attack and that great electoral danger resides in that reality.
This rare government refusal to say “terrorism” also suggests top Biden administration and campaign brass devised a strategy to hope against hope that legacy media won’t pick up this story. That it will all be forgotten. And that Trump will never realize he has in hand a sledgehammer for the first televised debate.
But those who care about the national security threat that Biden’s open-borders policy has created are not going away until his administration publicly goes on record ruling out a terrorism motive. Certainly not Texas Rep. Chip Roy and the dozen congressmen who just sent a letter demanding answers about the attack. Not me. And not Potomac Local News’ Kelly Sienkowski, she tells me.
The American people have a right and need to know that a border-crosser has just conducted the first terror attack on U.S. soil, just like those who have fretted about such a thing for three years worried would happen.
Government failure to acknowledge, willingly publicize, and fix that problem — in favor of selfish political gain — will only aid and abet new attacks, some of which U.S. Marines may not be able to thwart.
Daily Caller
Laura Ingraham’s Viral Clash With Trump Prompts Her To Tell Real Reasons China Sends Students To US
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
On Monday, Ingraham pressed Trump on why a plan to admit 600,000 Chinese nationals into U.S. universities qualifies as a “pro-MAGA” move, challenging him directly after he defended the influx as vital to maintaining Washington’s relationship with Beijing. During a Wednesday broadcast, Ingraham said no modern president has fought harder for American workers than Trump and predicted he will “honor that distinction for the next three years.”
“There was also more consternation over the approach to allowing Chinese and other foreign students to take spots at U.S. universities. A lot of MAGA folks didn’t like that at all. And it’s not, by the way, as some Chinese influencers today said on X, I love this, it’s not that the MAGA folks, certainly not myself, dislike the Chinese people. It’s ridiculous,” Ingraham said.
“What they dislike is the Chinese system that represses Chinese people and uses them as human spies and saboteurs. Remember, when the CCP greenlights hundreds of thousands of their people to come study here, they’re not sending them so they can learn about the wonders of Western civilization, Plato and Socrates, Greek history, become champions of individual freedom and take that message back home. They’re sent here to do whatever is necessary to learn how to push the People’s Republic closer to crushing America, to stealing from us, and for spying on us,” Ingraham added.
Ingraham said that people “understandably perplexed by some of the president’s comments, we cannot forget, what American president has ever been tougher on China than Donald Trump? None.”
Ingraham told viewers that Beijing does not send its students to America to study the Western canon or return home as advocates of individual liberty.
WATCH:
Ingraham warned that China’s rise didn’t happen overnight, saying that decades of inattentive presidents allowed Beijing to gain the strength Trump now must confront.
“Given China’s growing strength that’s been amassed over decades of presidents who were out to lunch, President Trump inherited the most challenging situation,” Ingraham said. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this, that any president has faced in the last 50 years. He and his entire team are dedicated to countering the Chinese aggression that’s building.”
Washington and Beijing struck a deal in June clearing the way for Chinese nationals to enroll in American universities, a shift that followed the administration’s June 5 move blocking Harvard from bringing in additional international students. Officials justified the restriction by pointing to security vulnerabilities and rising campus turmoil, including allegations of antisemitic activity, as reasons to tighten the flow of foreign applicants.
Trump acknowledged at the time that admitting large numbers of students from a country controlled by the Chinese Communist Party carries real intelligence concerns, saying in June that the government “must be vigilant” about who enters U.S. classrooms. National security experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the policy could create openings for the CCP to exploit America’s higher-education system and potentially endanger U.S. interests.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
Dear Readers:
As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers. \
Please consider making a small donation of any amount here.
Thank you!
Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own
Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
Bizarre Decisions about Nicotine Pouches Lead to the Wrong Products on Shelves
Public Execution of Anti-Cartel Mayor in Michoacán Prompts U.S. Offer to Intervene Against Cartels
Canada’s heavy oil finds new fans as global demand rises
Alberta government’s plan will improve access to MRIs and CT scans
-
armed forces2 days agoIt’s time for Canada to remember, the heroes of Kapyong
-
Digital ID2 days agoCanada moves forward with digital identification for federal benefits seekers
-
Daily Caller2 days agoUS Nuclear Bomber Fleet Shares Fence With Trailer Park Linked To Chinese Intel-Tied Fraudster
-
Alberta2 days agoSchool defunding petition in Alberta is a warning to parents
-
espionage2 days agoChinese-Owned Trailer Park Beside U.S. Stealth Bomber Base Linked to Alleged Vancouver Repression Case
-
Daily Caller2 days agoLaura Ingraham Presses Trump On Allowing Flood Of Chinese Students Into US
-
Business2 days agoLiberals refuse to disclose the amount of taxpayer dollars headed to LGBT projects in foreign countries
-
Environment1 day agoThe Myths We’re Told About Climate Change | Michael Shellenberger