The White House rejected requests from Department of Homeland Security to make domestic terror a larger priority for over a year, sources told CNN's Jake Tapper.
"Homeland Security officials battled the White House for more than a year to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism," a senior source close to the Trump administration reportedly told CNN. "The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home.
"They had major ideological blinders on."
The report points to the director of national intelligence's National Strategy for Counterterrorism report minimizing the threat of domestic terror in the U.S., despite warning of its increasing importance, by clumping it in with other less urgent threats like "animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism," according to the report.
"Ultimately the White House just added one paragraph about domestic terrorism as a throw-away line," a senior source involved told CNN.
A senior administration official defended its report, saying Wednesday it was the first ever to address domestic terror.
"This administration's National Strategy for Counterterrorism was the first to ever include domestic terrorism," the official told CNN. "This issue continues to be a priority for this administration, and the National Security Council has launched an interagency process focused on combating domestic terrorism in support of the president's counterterrorism strategy."
Going forward and in the short-run, the issue of domestic terror will suffer from a shortage of funding, according to a senior Trump administration official to CNN's Tapper.
"DHS is surging resources to the [domestic terrorism] issue, but they're behind the curve because of lack of support from the White House," the source said. "There's some legislative and appropriations work happening, but the reality is there won't be a FY20 budget for the department so they will have to make do."
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