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Donald Trump has had quite a bit to say in the aftermath of the deadly attack in New Orleans, though most of the president-elect’s rhetoric has been deeply unfortunate. In a series of social media missives, the Republican has peddled ugly misinformation in ways that should do lasting harm to what remains of his credibility.
But one element of Trump’s reaction to the violence stood out as especially strange. From one of his online messages:
The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat [sic] state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country. The CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late.
We’ve already discussed why most of Trump’s post deserves to be discarded as ridiculous. He has no evidence of widespread prosecutorial corruption; “violent scum” has not infiltrated the government; and so on.
But it was that last sentence that deserves some follow-up scrutiny: The Central Intelligence Agency, according to the president-elect, must “get involved” immediately.
Get involved, how, exactly?
In context, it was not all clear who or what Trump expects the CIA to investigate. Does he envision a scenario in which the intelligence agency examines the attack in New Orleans? If so, that would be bizarre, given that it would have no jurisdiction — the CIA’s remit is international intelligence gathering — and the matter can be handled by state, local, and federal law enforcement.
Maybe he envisions a scenario in which the agency targets state, local and federal prosecutors? If so, that would probably be illegal given the scope of the CIA’s responsibilities.
Or perhaps the Republican would like to see the CIA hunt for the “violent scum” that, in Trump’s overactive imagination, has “infiltrated all aspects of our government”? It’s possible, though once again, these people don't appear to exist in reality, and the CIA has no such authority to launch a scum search.
To be sure, there’s no reason to assume that Trump knows what the CIA does or the limits of the agency’s authority. But therein lies part of the problem: He might soon start directing the CIA to initiate the kind of investigations that it cannot legally conduct.
For his part, far-right media personality Steve Bannon apparently saw the president-elect’s message and said on his podcast, “[N]o, we don’t want the CIA involved in anything domestically, they’re involved too much domestically as is.”