The Threat of Domestic Terrorism Leading up To Inauguration

MARGARET SULLIVAN, “THE WASHINGTON POST”: So this is a — what’s being called the big lie. And the big lie is that the election was rigged, and that there was widespread fraud. And this is something that President Trump has been laying the groundwork for since long before the election. And right-wing media, pro-Trump media has taken up this idea. And so it has circulated among the public very widely. But, also, there’s a whole underworld of online social media and other ways of communicating that are underneath the surface. So, both, I think, on the surface, you can turn on FOX News, and, underneath the surface, most of us aren’t on 4chan, but it’s happening there and in other places like that. And it’s very widespread. So — and then, of course, it’s being echoed by elected — echoed and magnified by our elected officials, many of whom have propagated this big lie. And so it’s become — we can see that it’s not a case of no harm, no foul with this. And, yes, of course, there are free speech issues here. But I think that many of them are being presented in bad faith. Oh, it’s a cancel culture. You mustn’t exert any effort to restrain this. And that’s just not the case.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Well, let’s move on to Ali Soufan about this, because you have real life experience in dealing with this kind of extremism, different kinds, not domestic terrorism, mostly. And you recently wrote in your newsletter: “If President Trump is allowed to successfully sow discord, having already compromised security by stalling the transition process and undermining president-elect Biden, he may do more long-term damage to the United States than even adversaries like al Qaeda and ISIS were able to inflict.” I have to say, that’s a shocking conclusion. And I’d like you to explain why you think that.

ALI SOUFAN, FORMER FBI INTERROGATOR: What happened last Wednesday was a strike on the heart of our democracy. It further divided us. Frankly, Trump reduced the political discourse in America, including the media coverage, to a spectator sport. Real professional journalism, factual press, moderate voices became dim and boring and deemed increasingly undesirable, not to say that there are a lot of publications, like “The Washington Post” in “The New York Times” and others, who continued to do a good expose of him. ‘ But, in general, in the last four years, we have seen the middle disappeared. Unfortunately, many in the media became to exist in two partisan bubbles that were mostly speaking to each other, but not to the American people, and certainly not to the centrist or the center and the moderates in the middle.