Samantha Bee skewered the FBI for creating a new terrorist category called Black Identity Extremist on Wednesday.
The new designation, revealed in a report from last August, defines a Black Identity Extremist as those who feel oppressed and respond with violence. Feeling oppressed and responding with violence doesnt make you a terrorist, it makes you an Eagles fan, Bee joked.
More seriously, she added, the Black Identity Extremist report gives law enforcement an excuse to surveil the communities that are protesting them. Surveilling Americans because of their free speech is dangerous and wrong.
Bee was especially troubled by top law enforcement officials refusal to answer direction questions about the Black Identity Extremist designation. She showed footage from a congressional hearing in which Representative Karen Bass asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray about the origins of the black identity extremist report. Both Sessions and Wray deflected or dodged the congresswomans inquiries.
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The FBI is criminalizing being black and angry, chilling free speech and ignoring reasonable requests for information from black congresswomen, Bee declared.
In addition, Bee took a moment to poke fun at the right-wing furor overthe Nunes Memo, part of the latest effort by Republican congressmen to discredit Robert Muellers investigation of President Trump. The response to the memo has been restrained, Bee joked, before cutting to a clip of Sean Hannity calling the new document the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history. Taking cues from Hannitys hyperbole, Bee added sarcastically, this scandal is bigger than one hundred Bill Clintons having sex with a thousand Watergates and a million Area 51s!
She also teased Nunes for promising to release additional memos, which Bee likened to bad Hollywood sequels. Get ready for Nunes Memo: Tokyo Drift, NMVP: Nunes Memo vs. Predator, and for the kids, Nunes Memo: The Squeakquel, she said.