Authorities are slowly learning more about what motivated 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar to turn a truck into a weapon on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early Wednesday morning.
The act of terror left 15 people dead and another 35 injured. The FBI says Jabbar acted alone and, despite being a military veteran, was inspired by ISIS. An ISIS flag was found in the truck Jabbar was driving and in a post on Facebook, Jabbar admitted to joining ISIS.
Cully Stimson, Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow and policy expert in crime control, national security, immigration, and homeland security, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast Bonus Edition” to discuss the FBI’s investigation into the attack. Stimson also addresses the likelihood the attack was linked with the explosion of a Cybertruck outside one of President-elect Donald Trump’s hotels in Las Vegas.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Virginia Allen: The FBI is searching for answers following a terrorist attack in New Orleans that left 15 people dead.
Joining me now to discuss is Cully Stimson. He serves as a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He’s also an expert in homeland security, crime prevention, and immigration. Cully, welcome back to “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Cully Stimson: Great to be with you.
Allen: Let’s talk about what we know about this man who has been found to have been driving the vehicle. He was found to have an ISIS flag in his truck, but his past in many ways is pretty normal. He served in our military, he worked in corporate America. He had a family, though he was divorced. How does someone like that become radicalized?
Stimson: We don’t know with respect to this guy, but you’re right, he was born in Beaumont, Texas. He went into the Army. He was the IT guy, among other jobs. He then got out, went to corporate America, was a real estate guy, seemed to have a normal life.
But if you look at the pictures of him from the time he was in the Army where he was squared away and had a high and tight and then corporate America where he looked like a corporate dude, and then all of a sudden he gets this typical jihadi beard and the look in his eyes changed. Take a look at that. I mean, I’ve been around terrorists. I’ve been around the worst of the worst, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. They got a look.
And so, we don’t know what ISIS or followers of ISIS or what he was drawn to about ISIS, but when you think about people like him or the Fort Hood shooter or the shooter at Pensacola, or even Bradley Manning, why he was willing to betray his country and take it upon himself to break into databases and provide the biggest amount of intelligence trove to WikiLeaks, who then provided it to our enemy, which resulted in people killed and billions of dollars—we just don’t know why people do these things.
The irony here, Virginia, among many ironies, is on the 6th of December, 2024, the FBI and the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center put out a memo. It’s unclassified and it warns about potential for upcoming lone-person attacks by either homegrown terrorists or terrorist-inspired people in the United States who will go after Americans at large events with simple means, including ramming people with a vehicle. So that is in their own memo to the field.
And so, you can never prevent 100% of these things on one level. This was sophisticated, took a lot of planning on another level, it was a dude in a truck who evaded a barrier and drove at a high rate of speed.
Allen: Do you hold local and state law enforcement at all accountable for what happened? Or like you said, is it just no matter what you do, you can have all the security in place and still, if people are bent on doing evil, it’s hard to stop that 100% of the time?
Stimson: Look, I think it’s too early to point fingers except at the murderer, and there’ll be a time for that if there were mistakes made or if there were obvious clues that they should have seen or acted on.
You keep hearing this: If you see something, say something. Maybe somebody saw something before, said something, and somebody blew it off. Maybe it showed up on somebody’s queue in their computer and they’re away on holiday and didn’t follow up. Maybe some loved one or friend of this dude said, “Look, he’s acting like a nut job. He’s going to do something.” And somebody didn’t follow up that.
But we don’t know that yet. And so, I think we need—I’m a facts guy, like I said to you, and I like to wait until facts come out. And the political blaming has already started. I don’t do that. I focus on facts and what we can do wrong, but to do right, but you cannot make this Fort America.
You can’t protect against 100% of these things. We still live in a free society with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. And so, we’re going to have a Super Bowl. We’re going to have these bowl games. We’re going to have other big sporting events. We’re going to have the World Cup in 2026, the biggest sporting event in the world, in a couple years. So, we have to be able to live our lives, but we also have to trust that the people we give the privilege of serving in senior government positions are doing their job. And on the watch 24/7, 365.
Allen: It’s critical, as this investigation is continuing, really just starting in so many ways, but it’s been less than 48 hours since this tragedy. What are the questions that are being asked right now? Specifically, I’m thinking about federal agencies, the FBI. What are the big questions that they’re asking and searching for answers to?
Stimson: Well, it’s a multilayered investigation. So, at the upper level, at the classified level, they’re seeing whether any contacts with foreign people, they may be using surveillance tools and checking surveillance databases like the 702 database, etc. …
Allen: What is the 702 database?
Stimson: That’s the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA. Remember, it was extended. It’s only extended through March, by the way, of this year. So, they may be seeing whether he’s been in communication with people overseas, and we record the content of those communications, not just when they called, the metadata. So, at the upper level, they’ll look at that.
They’ll look at his social media profile and other encrypted communication devices. If they can break into those, they will. If they can’t, they may get help from outside vendors who can help with that.
At the unclass level, they’re going to search other databases, including video. I’m sure there are toll roads, cameras. And then I said, regular American people, visitors have been told to upload their video to the FBI databases.
His credit card footprint, his bank account information, because he’s dead. They’re not collecting it for purposes of a prosecution. They’re collecting it for purposes of developing a thorough understanding of what, if any, clues were missed. And maybe there weren’t any clues missed. Maybe he’s just a dude who just took it upon himself to do a horrific thing and not much could have been done to stop him.
I mean, here’s an ex-Army guy who rents a truck. What rider, truck person’s going to say, “You know what? I’m not renting you a truck.” I mean, that’s just not America. And so, we don’t know, we don’t know—to quote my old boss, Don Rumsfeld.
But this multidisciplinary process where the FBI, the feds have the lead, they have access to databases that local officials don’t, and that’s the way it needs to be. But then we have a new Congress and the new Congress, no doubt, will conduct or consider conducting oversight hearings at the unclass and then in a closed setting to find out what stuff in the background that the intelligence service knew, if anything.
And there’s a lot more to this story. We’ll find out more about this story. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump administration and leaders in the national security space put together an after-action report because [President Joe] Biden only has a couple more weeks in office. And so, this is always a vulnerable time in America because you have one president at a time, but this president is to be charitable, not with his A game anymore, and you have a president who has an A-plus game and a lot of vigor. But this period is dangerous, and we don’t want to send a signal to the enemies of the United States, foreign or domestic, that we’re going to let our guard down. And that’s really important, to show strength and resolve.
Allen: You have studied ISIS quite extensively. You’ve written on them before. Is it quite common for them to target individuals for radicalization, to say, “OK, this is someone that maybe has some ties to the Middle East or family members who grew up in the Middle East, so we’re going to target them with certain intentions of trying to radicalize them”? Is that normal?
Stimson: Well, I mean, is that a common practice of theirs? Yes. It’s not normal to be a terrorist, but it is a common practice for al-Qaeda, and then member ISIS was created in 2004 as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and then formally divorced themselves from al-Qaeda in 2013 because they didn’t think al-Qaeda was brutal enough. Yeah, they’re counting on weak, vulnerable, impressionable, usually, men.
Every now and then you see a woman joining the jihad or joining the movement, the struggle, and sadly, we’ve seen it before that certain Americans get sucked into this, and for some godawful reason, take action. I’m sure there are many others who are sucked into it, don’t take action, but I hope that when they watch the news of this event and see this guy took this to the ultimate extreme and he got killed in the process, they decide, “You know what? I better just drop it and move on to something productive in my life.”
Look, one of the comments that I will never forget that Guantanamo and other detainees who are al-Qaeda, Taliban, and associated forces would say when they were interrogated lawfully is … “You have watches, we have calendars.” It means, “You guys look at the time and you’re under the gun because of political pressures to end the war in Afghanistan or end the war in Iraq. We take a very, very long view. It takes 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years to establish a caliphate. It’s worth it.” And so, they take a very different long view than we do.
Allen: Really critical, I think, to understand that, to understand that mindset so different than the Western World.
Stimson: Sick, very sick. Very sick. Very real.
Allen: Does this, in your mind, constitute any sort of concerning resurgence of ISIS? Because for so long it seemed we really were hearing nothing, and now over the past year we’ve started to hear a little bit more about ISIS.
Stimson: Well, I think we can say with some degree of confidence that the precipitous and unwise withdrawal from Afghanistan unleashed a whirlwind. It sent a message of weakness. It emboldens our enemies. I would defer to people like Rob Greenway or Victoria Coates who can speak more intelligently about the intel on the national security side of it.
My sense in talking to them and reading is that that did not dissuade ISIS from marching forward. It’s ironic too that here you have this horrific event in New Orleans the same week that Joe Biden is letting more detainees out of Guantanamo, repatriating them home. I mean, what double message does that send to the enemies of the United States that we’re re-arming you with your jihadi? And then you have an open border and dozens of people who are on the terrorist watch list have been captured crossing the southern border.
You also know, and they know because they read, that you have 600,000 people on the non-detained docket, including 13,000-plus convicted murderers and 15,000-plus convicted sex offenders. They must be high-fiving themselves, laughing at how weak we’re coming across and how we’re just whittling away our sovereignty. And I’m sure they are none too pleased that the ball game’s changing on January 20th, because it will change.
Allen: Really critical. Let’s take just a moment with the little bit of time we have left, Cully, to talk about what happened in Las Vegas. So, of course, there was a Cybertruck there parked outside the Trump Hotel in downtown Las Vegas. It exploded. There were fireworks found in the back, canisters of gasoline. There had been question marks as to are these two events somehow connected? Both individuals use the car rental app Turo, sort of like Airbnb for cars, in order to purchase these vehicles. They were both in the military. In your assessment, could these acts have been somehow connected, even though there’s no indication for the one in Las Vegas that there was any association with the terrorist organization?
Stimson: I’m not there yet. Yeah, they were both in the Army. Yeah, they were both at a base in Texas, but there’s a lot of big Army bases in Texas and a lot of basic training is in Texas. And so, that’s like saying, “Oh, the Navy guys were at Great Lakes.” Well, that’s where the naval training center is for all Navy enlisted.
And look, this comes across more as a huge middle finger, pardon my French, to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. You get the biggest, baddest Cybertruck and you park it in front of the Trump International Hotel, and you give the bird to Elon Musk and Trump.
Now, whether the guy meant to die—maybe he didn’t know the fuse was going to go so quickly. Maybe he did want to die. I don’t know. It’s sad either way that somebody would even go that far, but I’ll withhold judgment as to whether or not there’s any connection between the two. I mean, I’m not stupid. They happened on the same day or time, they used the same app, etc. But I’m not there facts-wise yet.
Allen: As we continue to watch this unfold the next 24 or 48 hours, what will you be watching for?
Stimson: I’ll be looking for facts that come out that tell me more about his radicalization path and the planning, because that’ll tell us a lot about how quickly he came to this scheme, the planning, and whether there were other people involved.
I mean, the FBI says there are, so if they roll up some other people and they sing or they’re not killed in a shootout and they sing or they lawyer up, then we’ll be able to get more information from their social media profile and the ball start rolling down the hill. But I think we’re a long way from getting even a 50% picture of this guy.
