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Establishment media host Michael Steele filled in for Jen Psaki on The Briefing on July 30, 2026, and brought on former CIA Director John Brennan.
A longtime fixture of Washington’s politicized intelligence establishment, Brennan helped advance the debunked Russia-collusion narrative that consumed President Trump’s first term.
Since leaving government, he has remained one of Trump’s most vocal and relentless critics and a regular presence on anti-Trump cable news.
Steele used the segment to attack the Trump administration for broadening terrorism designations to include violent gangs and cartels and for designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
He then dismissed Antifa as merely an “idea” and absurdly suggested that Trump had designated “anti-fascism” itself as terrorism.
This was one of the most ignorant and intellectually dishonest exchanges I have heard since I watched the fake news last week.
Imagine relying on this program for news.
You would walk away believing that Antifa is merely an “anti-fascist idea,” that Trump targeted gangs, cartels, and Antifa for political reasons rather than national security, that the administration is diverting FBI analysts to Georgia to look into voting issues as another politically motivated objective, and that left-wing violence barely exists compared with a supposedly massive right-wing terrorist threat Brennan could not even identify in the United States.
Michael Steele:
Director Brennan, one of the things that this country continues to fail at is recognizing the homegrown variety of domestic terrorism that has plagued this country since the Civil War.
One of the things this report points out is how the Trump administration has broadened the designation of terrorist organizations to include gangs and cartels, as well as designating Antifa, which isn’t a structured organization.
It’s an idea. They’re anti-fascist, right? Anti-fascism as a domestic terrorism organization.
How does this undermine our national security at the expense of Trump’s political goals? Because you’re going, again, after political opponents as opposed to going after real domestic homegrown terrorism, which we’ve experienced here in the United States?
John Brennan:
I think counterterrorism professionals over the past couple of decades recognize that, well, yes, there are some left-wing groups that do engage in some violence.
The number of those groups pales in comparison to those that are on the right wing, whether it’s here in the United States or in other places around the globe, such as in Germany, like the AfD group. These are neo-Nazi groups and others.
And so we’ve really seen here over the last, you know, 10 or 15 years the growth of these right-wing groups.
And this is where I know the FBI professionals that I had worked with were very concerned about making sure that we’re able to understand exactly what they’re doing, who they’re collaborating with.
Are they getting outside support, foreign support, foreign instigation? These are things that the counterterrorism professionals really want to understand.
But if you’re taking away, for example, FBI analysts and sending them down to Georgia to take a look at some of the voting issues there, it really is just taking away the capabilities that we have to prevent the attacks.
We want to stop these terrorist activities upstream, not when somebody is ready to set off a bomb, but to see them when they’re starting to gain the financing and put together the capabilities, to make the contacts and relationships, and to start the plot and plan.
These are the things that, again, federal, state, and local officials are supposed to be doing, as opposed to going after these, again, politically motivated objectives that really make this country less safe and undermine the work that I said, you know, under President George W. Bush.
You know, I was the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He made sure that the different agencies and departments had the capabilities, had the resources, but also were working together with one another.
Now it seems the Trump administration is taking that apart. And unfortunately, I think it does put us at greater risk.
These two fake-news operatives—Democrat activists and mouthpieces for the establishment—are either completely detached from reality and ignoring the FBI’s own press releases, or they know exactly what is happening and are deliberately misleading their viewers.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases
I have never seen the FBI work this hard to arrest so many criminals and terrorists.
Since President Trump returned to office and Kash Patel became FBI Director, the pace of enforcement has increased dramatically.
Cartel members, Tren de Aragua terrorists, MS-13 members and gang leaders, Sinaloa and CJNG operatives, child predators, child pornographers, human traffickers, alien smugglers, fentanyl and meth traffickers, domestic terrorists, foreign terrorists, ISIS supporters, and violent extremists are being arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced at a pace we have never seen before.
But these two fake-news talking heads do not want their viewers to know any of it.
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