FBI Director Christopher Wray said his agency does not monitor the campus protests over the Israel–Hamas war.
NBC News‘s Lester Holt asked Wray if he was concerned about the possible threats coming from the protests over Gaza.
“Of course demonstrations themselves are not something that we, the FBI, get involved in, but when violence ensues, that’s when we get concerned, when you have threats of violence. So we have seen, even before Oct. 7, we saw a significant increase, especially in antisemitic threats and antisemitic violence,” Wray said in an interview with Holt on Tuesday.
Holt followed up with a question, “Are you actively monitoring these protests?”
“We don’t monitor protests, but we do share intelligence about specific threats of violence with campuses and local law enforcement,” Wray answered.
He added, “But we don’t monitor protests.”
Social media chimed in on Wednesday with a slew of examples of the FBI getting involved in protests.
“The protesters were screaming ‘We are Hamas’ and the FBI isn’t interested,” a woman said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, about the terrorist organization that attacked Israel in October 2023.
“Is he hoping we have a short memory, because we don’t. Drone footage from protests in the US,” one person said, linking to news about the FBI’s secret spy place footage over the Freddie Gray protests.
“Monitor? Come on man, there were hundreds of FBI infiltrators in the J6 crowd,” another person responded.
“Hey don’t MONITOR protests, they PARTICIPATE in them,” a woman named Wendy said.
According to former FBI official Steven D’Antuono, the FBI had so many paid confidential informants planted in the crowd during the January 6th protests that they “lost track of the number” and had to do an audit later. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said he found it concerning that the “FBI cannot adequately track the activities” and “lost control.”
Another social media user said, “I suppose it’s safer to spy on parents and churchgoers, rather than rioters.”
“Accept when they infiltrate and initiate violence for the purposes is entrapment,” one person said in response to Wray’s comments on NBC.
“’We don’t monitor protests’ unless they carry American flags,” a social media user said.
“He’s so busy trying to frame Trump,” an X user said.
In 2023, an FBI whistleblower shared with the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about the bureau targeting certain “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as potential terrorists in a memorandum in its Richmond office’s internal FBI systems.
In 2022, anti-abortion activist Mark Houck was arrested by the FBI at his home after the FBI questioned anti-abortion activists outside a Planned Parenthood in Minnesota. The charges against Houck were eventually dismissed.
In 2021, Loudoun County, Virginia, father Scott Smith had attended a school board meeting to protest the sexual assault of his teenage daughter by a transgender student and was arrested for a confrontation at the meeting. The National School Boards Administration characterized him and other parents as “domestic terrorists” in a Sept. 29, 2021, letter to President Joe Biden.
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The NSBA letter requested assistance from various federal law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department and the FBI, to target parents for “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials … could be the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
In October 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum to direct federal law enforcement to intervene and monitor “harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers.”
