McCabe suggests FBI 'spreading their terrorism resources too thin' with recent immigration activity

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe suggested that the FBI is “spreading” its “terrorist resources too thin” as some agents are being diverted to crack down on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. 

McCabe was discussing the FBI’s newly-established task force to investigate the increased number of vandalism incidents targeting Tesla vehicles and dealerships around the country. He contended on CNN that the bureau should not need to “move resources” because there is already a “long-established domestic terrorism section [...] that was built to do exactly this.” 

“So this raises questions for me about why isn't the current state of the bureau's defense domestic terrorism investigators good enough to handle this?" McCabe asked during his Tuesday appearance on CNN. "And could it be because they have recently [been] distracted and tasked with engaging in immigration activity."

McCabe said he thinks the FBI relying on its Joint Terrorism Task Forces to help out Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations "is not a good idea."

"We don't want our terrorism forces to be something, doing something other than terrorism,” he said.

The need for a special task force targeting Tesla vandalism could imply a lack of appropriate manpower and resources, he suggested.

“If they need a task force now to get this done that could be an indication that they're spreading their terrorism resources too thin.” 

The FBI’s new task force consists of 10 people as a joint effort between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI’s counterterrorism division. 

Thousands of federal law enforcement officers for multiple agencies have recently been moved to help out with immigration crackdowns, Reuters reported Saturday, citing interviews with over 20 current and former federal agents, including other federal officials and lawyers. 

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Reuters that the government is “mobilizing federal and state law enforcement to find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens” while the FBI said to the newswire that the bureau is "protecting the U.S. from many threats.”

McCabe said the FBI pulling agents to form a task force to combat the recent incidents against Tesla is not an “uncommon” thing as the law enforcement agency is “confronted with a new and sort of emerging threat.” 

“They'll try to disrupt it with things like arrests and to basically mitigate this threat. And then that gives them some time to decide if they need to move resources to address this sort of thing permanently. The question whether they need to is a really interesting one, though," the former acting director of the FBI said on Tuesday. 

"Because they shouldn't need to," McCabe argued.

“There is a long-established domestic terrorism section and program within the FBI that was built to do exactly this,” McCabe said. “We saw a very similar activity in the 1980s and 90s around things like environmental extremists and animal rights extremists - same sort of vandalism approach to stopping that activity - and that was something that the domestic terrorism program addressed very effectively.”