House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday that Biden administration officials were focused on “nonsense” before the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed at least 15 people.
The Louisiana Republican said in a “Fox & Friends” appearance that “they told us … for four years that the number one threat was so-called ‘racially motivated extremism.’ It was nonsense. This is the thing that we were all concerned about.”
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a US-born Texas resident and Army veteran who reportedly converted from Christianity to Islam in his youth, used a rented Ford pickup truck early Wednesday to plow down pedestrians on Bourbon Street before dying in a police shoot-out. The vehicle had an Islamic State flag.
Authorities are investigating the attack’s potential connection to an explosion hours later inside a rented Tesla Cybertruck parked outside President-elect Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel, in which one person inside the vehicle died.
Johnson said Republicans are particularly concerned about potential terrorists infiltrating through the US-Mexico border after record-high illegal crossings during retiring President Biden’s term, which have subsided following a June executive action that throttled asylum processing.
“This is why we raised the alarms. This is why we passed H.R. 2, the strongest border security act ever passed by Congress, and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate would not put that through and make it into law,” Johnson said.
“The Biden administration has a lot to account for here, and we see now, in glaring view of everybody, that this dereliction of duty has real consequences. It’s a concern, and it will be an ongoing concern for some time.”
Follow the latest on the terror attack on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street:
- New Orleans terror attack live updates: Suspect pictured, ISIS flag found in vehicle
- Neighbor saw pickup truck used by New Orleans terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar leaving Airbnb hours before rampage
- NY Times reporter who interviewed New Orleans terrorist 10 years ago describes ‘calm, collected’ demeanor
- Killer driver Shamsud-Din Jabbar seen in first photo after he mowed down dozens of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans
The truck used by Jabbar reportedly crossed the US-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, earlier in the week, but it’s unclear if he was the driver or if the attack featured any connection to illegal immigration or directly coordination with international terrorists.
“We all know that for the last four years, the Biden administration has been completely derelict in its duty,” Johnson charged.
“Congressional Republicans, we here in the House and the Senate, have repeatedly asked the DHS under the Biden administration about the correlation, the obvious concern, about terrorism and the wide-open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potential terrorist cells around the country, we have been ringing the alarms.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) offered similar commentary Wednesday night on Fox News, saying: “We’ve been saying for over a year now that there’s likely to be a terrorist attack on our home soil with an open southern border.”
“We don’t know if that’s the reason the truck did come across the southern border,” Scalise said, “but we just know that we have to be on a higher alert. And all these agencies need to be not just on a higher alert, but need to be candid with the public about what they find.”
Recent US terrorist attacks motivated by Islamic extremism include the 2017 Lower Manhattan truck rampage that killed eight and the 2016 mass-shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., that killed 49.
Recent racially motivated attacks, by comparison, included the 2022 massacre of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, which was motived by alleged anti-black racism, and the 2015 murder of nine at a church in Charleston, SC, by a white supremacist.
