Doubling down on his fevered anti-Trump rhetoric, Frank Figliuzzi, who was named former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2011 by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, compared Trump supporters to members of a terrorist organization.
As Newsbusters reports, Figliuzzi, who retired from the FBI in 2012. worked at General Electric for five years, and now is National Security Contributor for NBC News, appeared on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” with host Chris Jansing. The discussion revolved around whether it would be smart for Democrats to accuse Trump supporters of racism because they supported an allegedly racist president.
Jansing prodded, “I think one of the things, Frank Figliuzzi, is that this president has always, from anyone who was around him, Anthony Scaramucci knows this as well as anybody else, demanded this blind loyalty, right? ‘I say it, it must be so. Or even if you don’t think it’s so, you don’t criticize me for it.’"
Figliuzzi responded, “Well, this is why it's so important to look through the lens of radicalization when you look at this president and then apply counterradicalization techniques. Because you're right, attacking his followers is going to be counterproductive. He demands that loyalty, and they are loyal. So if you call Trump followers racist en masse, they simply coalesce around each other and become even more defensive and protective of the leader, just as they would in, say, a terrorist organization ..."
Figliuzzi speculated that the White House had ordered flags flown at half-staff to honor the victims of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton to be pulled down on August 8 because 8/8 was code for Heil hitler, and thus a secret message to white supremacists. Figliuzzi was speaking of his “experience in international terrorism and radicalization to Islamic jihad” when he opined:
You see the same things happening now in white hate groups, in white supremacy groups, where not only is the internet facilitating the speed of radicalization but our leader, our chief executive, is seen as almost a mentor and a radicalizer. And unfortunately today we did not hear from that person that these extremists and unstable people look to. He spoke in the passive voice, in the collective voice; we didn’t hear first person from him. We didn’t hear, “I condemn white hate ideology.” We heard the nation must condemn it. Well, the nation does condemn it. But we didn’t hear what we needed to hear, so what happens is the extremists interpret what the president read off the script today as something he needed to say, something he didn’t really want to say.Now I’m not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using this as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that’s being demonstrated by the White House: the numbers 8/8 are very significant in white supremacy and neo-Nazi movement. Why? Because the letter H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them, the numbers 8/8 stand together for Heil Hitler.
Video below: