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FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies in Washington, D.C., January 29, 2019. (Joshua Roberts\/Reuters)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
By MAIREAD MCARDLE
\nNational Review<\/p>\n
FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress on Tuesday that the majority of domestic-terrorism arrests since last October have been linked to white supremacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will say that a majority of the domestic-terrorism cases that we\u2019ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white-supremacist violence, but it does include other things as well,\u201d the FBI chief said in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.<\/p>\n
Wray explained that since October, the FBI has arrested about 100 people on international-terrorism charges and about the same number of individuals on charges related to domestic extremism.<\/p>\n
The FBI director emphasized that his investigators\u2019 \u201cfocus is on the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe the FBI don\u2019t investigate the ideology, no matter how repugnant. We investigate violence. And any extremist ideology, when it turns to violence, we\u2019re all over it,\u201d Wray said. \u201cWe take domestic terrorism or hate crime \u2013 regardless of ideology \u2013 extremely seriously, I can assure you, and we are aggressively pursuing it using both counterterrorism resources and criminal investigative resources and partnering closely with our state and local partners.\u201d<\/p>\n
President Trump has repeatedly come under fire for using rhetoric that his opponents say encourages violent, racist tendencies. Critics have warned that violence resulting from white-supremacist ideologies has been on the rise since Trump took office.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t, really,\u201d Trump said in March when asked if he thinks white nationalism is a growing threat. \u201cI think it\u2019s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
The highest-profile act of violence perpetrated by a white supremacist over the last few years occurred at a 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where one of the male rally-goers murdered one counter-protesters and injured dozens of others by mowing them down with his car. The man has\u00a0received<\/a>\u00a0several life sentences for his crimes.<\/p>\n