[Moments after New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell called Wednesday’s tragedy a “terrorist attack,” FBI Assistant Special Agent Alethea Duncan said, “this is not a terrorist event.”
But it’s not alarming to see officials “not maybe perfectly connected on how they’re going to message this and present it to the public at this early hour,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CNN Wednesday morning.
It’s possible the mayor used the term “terrorist attack” colloquially – without reflecting the FBI’s formal definition for terrorism, said Juliette Kayyem, CNN’s national security, intelligence and terrorism analyst.
“This is an act of terror in the sense that it is terrorizing a city. Ten people are dead. The city is closed down. And the mayor may have been using … the term ‘terror’ as a reflection and a description of what this kind of violence does to a city, regardless of the perpetrator’s intent,” Kayyem said.
But for the FBI to determine an act was terrorism, “you have to prove a certain kind of intent,” Kayyem said.
The FBI defines domestic terrorism as “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”
The agency defines international terrorism as “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).”
The mayor and the FBI agent did agree on which agency is now leading the investigation: the FBI.
The FBI “investigates many things for the purpose of determining whether or not they are terrorist acts,” McCabe said. “They could still be in the phase of trying to make that determination for themselves.”
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