Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf revealed to Tucker Carlson Monday evening that the Department of Justice has started an investigation into the organization and funding of violent protests that have turned a number of U.S. cities upside down in the last few months.
“This is something that I have talked to the AG personally about,” Wolf told the Fox News host, mentioning that the DOJ is now zoned-in on “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, [and] the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.”
“What we know, Tucker, is that we have seen groups and individuals move from Portland to other parts of the country,” Wolf continued. “Almost 100 of them were from out of state.”
Wolf announced the investigation just after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) asked the Justice Department to look into people supplying financial support to the highly organized riots following an incident on the last night of the Republican National Convention where he and his wife were confronted by a group of hostile leftists.
Paul’s remarks came in an opinion piece for Fox News published Friday upon discovering some of the agitators were staying in the same hotel as he and his wife—on the same floor, no less.
Paul wrote that “well-intentioned protest marches long ago were hijacked into lawless and violent destructive anarchy, often led by outside agitators and violent Marxists.”
The Kentucky senator went on to single out the people in government he sees as personally responsible, saying “[Washington, D.C. mayor] Bowser and many others are responsible for what happened. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called my Senate colleagues and me ‘enemies of the state.’ Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris has advocated paying bail to get violent rioters out of jail.”
“Three Democratic House members who are part of the socialist ‘Squad’ have called for people to ‘take to the streets.'”
“My question is: Who are these people?,” Paul wrote regarding the rioters. “Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in? Law enforcement needs to look at the funding of violent criminal activity like this. And national Democrats need to confront it. It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent. It’s not about Black [sic] lives or any lives; it’s about anarchy and destruction.”
Wolf told Carlson investigators have the same opinion that aggressive demonstrators “are moving around” the nation.
“We have seen them in D.C., in Sacramento, and elsewhere,” he said. “They are organized. We have seen similar tactics being used from Portland and other cities across the country as well.”
Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) has some of the same issues with the radical left’s source of funds. “The same time the left is talking about defunding the police, the left is talking about funding, in a huge way, these protests,” he told reporters on Sunday. “They’re coming from all over the country. They are having transportation costs, housing costs, food costs paid for and perhaps salaries and other things. So It’s important to know when you’re dealing with organized crime like this, where the funding is coming from.”
Wolf offered the assistance of the Department of Homeland Security to lend a hand to the Justice Department in their investigation.
“We are making sure that the investigations that we are involved in, we are getting that information over to the FBI, to those criminal investigators that are doing their job,” he said.
“I wish that was in a little quicker fashion,” Wolf went on, but “again, this administration, this president is committed to holding individuals accountable.”
Wolf said the probe will put the country on notice. “If you want to riot, you want to loot, you want to do some of these other criminal acts that we see around the country, there are going to be consequences for that.”