“He was deemed to be a distraction,” one defense official said.
Though senior officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, privately and publicly backed Garrison for a few months, multiple sources tell CNN the sustained GOP criticism eventually eroded internal support for him.Īs a result, Garrison and his work were quietly pushed aside, several current and former defense officials said. In this 2018 photo, Bishop Garrison speaks at a Nobody Is Above the Law rally protesting President Trump's interference in the Mueller investigation in Washington, DC. The working group’s since-departed leader, a Black combat veteran named Bishop Garrison, came under withering attack in 2021 by GOP lawmakers and right-wing media personalities, including one Fox News host who described him as a “MAGA purge man” for criticizing former President Donald Trump in a tweet prior to assuming the extremism adviser role at the Pentagon. Of the six recommendations the working group made at the end of 2021, only one has begun to be implemented across the Defense Department, a Pentagon spokesperson told reporters on May 18.
An early Biden administration initiative to root out extremism in the military was designed to identify people like Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman with a long-history of violent and racist behavior now accused of perpetrating one of the biggest leaks of classified documents in modern history.īut more than two years after the Countering Extremism Working Group was formed inside the Pentagon, the effort has vanished virtually without a trace.Īs the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.ĬNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.
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