Rick Shiffer interpreted the FBI’s search of former President Trump’s home as a “mobilization order,” he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social, the Twitter-like platform the former president founded. “As soon as the gun shop, the army dump, the pawn shop opens tomorrow, leave your work behind and grab what you need for battle. We cannot tolerate this.” Two days later, he tried armed to break into an FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio. He fled and when a cop saw him walking along the highway, Shiffer fired at him. Moments later, he himself was fatally hit by police bullets.
Shiffer was the most radical, but by no means the only American, who began to see FBI agents as enemies of the state. News outlets CNN and Fox News quoted federal police sources as saying that threats against them have risen exceptionally high following the Trump search.
The far-right news site Breitbart issued the search warrant on Friday, listing the names of the FBI agents. The official disclosure of the piece, at the request of the Justice Department, came a few hours later — with the agents’ names painted off, as usual. According to CNN, Truth Social sent out a push message on Friday with a reference to Breitbart’s article.
Director Chris Wray Addressed the “Unfounded Attacks on the Integrity of the FBI” in a short statement. “Violence and threats are dangerous and should be of concern to every American.”
That last remark may have particularly concerned those prominent members of the Republican Party who, in their zeal to assist Trump, accused the FBI and the Justice Department of political persecution. Even after it became clear on Friday that Trump did have state documents classified as state secrets, some even in a category of confidentiality that can only be viewed in high-security areas, the attacks on the FBI and Justice have not stopped.
Deadly Violence
“It’s even worse when you consider that this is just one part of a pattern of bureaucratic abuse against Trump,” Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel wrote in a statement. an opinion article for Fox News.
This broadening from ‘police’ to ‘the bureaucracy’ was deliberate and widely supported. This weekend, the House of Representatives passed a major law that, in addition to provisions on climate and medicines, also strengthens the IRS tax authorities. That service will be expanded by 87,000 employees, who will have to recoup more than their own personnel costs by helping with tax collection.
“The IRS is coming to get you,” was heard on right-wing discussion programs. It didn’t help that an advertisement in which the agency wanted to recruit personnel said that special agents “must carry a firearm and be prepared to use lethal force if necessary.” The nuance that this was a vacancy for the crime division of the service was missing in the Republican outrage.
Fire officials
On the day of the search, Trump in an email reminded his supporters of Schedule F, a decree issued in the weeks leading up to the election, which President Biden immediately revoked. It was intended to facilitate the firing of officials, “officials who go beyond their means, who knowingly undermine democracy,” Trump said.
On the very same day, a Trump adviser was allowed to enter the… Wall Street Journal explain in an op-ed why “every president” should reintroduce Schedule F. The piece is one long insinuation of officials who “should in theory be impartial” but who “hold their own political views.”
The adviser writes without further substantiation that he “regularly received reports at the White House of career officials who undermined presidential policy.”
Incidentally, numerous books have been published about Trump’s tenure in which advisers appointed by Trump himself did their best to undermine the policy, for example by removing papers with what they see as irresponsible plans so that the president would forget them. But the intent of all those pieces and comments is undeniable: This is driving a new, more intense phase of Trump’s fight against what he called the Deep State.
Bannon: We are at war
Steve Bannon, one of the spiritual fathers of Trumpism and a short-time White House adviser in 2017, said in his podcast on Tuesday War Room: “We are at war. We have allowed the left to build a civil service state that is immune to elections in the last fifty or sixty years.” He said that civil service state, “we have to fight against it, we have to tear it down brick by brick.”