The leader of a prominent Jewish group has condemned Leo Terrell, the head of Donald Trump’s official antisemitism taskforce, for sharing a post by a white supremacist.
The post Terrell shared was written by Patrick Casey last Wednesday. It accompanied footage of the US president saying in the Oval Office that Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senate minority leader, “used to be Jewish” and “is not Jewish anymore, he’s a Palestinian”.
In the post Casey said Trump “has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card”.
Casey is a former head of Identity Evropa, a defunct racist group. In that role, in 2018, he told NBC News his mission was to “take over” the Republican party “as much as possible”.
“Trump’s antisemitism chief shared an antisemitic, white supremacist post from a neo-Nazi involved in Charlottesville,” said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, in reference to the march by neo-Nazis and other extremists in support of Trump in Virginia in 2017, during which a counter-protester was killed.
“This administration doesn’t care about countering antisemitism,” Spitalnick said. “They care about exploiting it to attack democracy.”
Spitalnick previously led Integrity First for America, the group that steered a successful lawsuit against organizers of the Charlottesville march.
“We successfully sued [Casey’s] now-defunct hate group,” Spitalnick said on Monday.
Terrell, 70, is a civil rights attorney from California. A former Democrat but a Fox News contributor, he came out in support of Trump in 2020.
In January, Terrell was nominated to serve in the civil rights division of the US justice department. In February, the Trump administration announced that Terrell would lead “a multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism”, focused on college protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
Terrell said: “Antisemitism in any environment is repugnant to this nation’s ideals. The department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found. The Task Force to Combat Antisemitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending antisemitism in our schools.”
Now, attention to Terrell’s social media habits comes amid controversy regarding the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student and protest organizer. Khalil is being held for deportation under an obscure provision of immigration law but has not been charged with wrongdoing.
Raw Story, a progressive site, first noted that after sharing Casey’s tweet, Terrell shared another by Keith and Kevin Hodge, podcasters the advocacy group Stop Antisemitism said have “taken a puzzling antisemitic turn”, including “admitting to listening to Hitler’s speeches … wishing America had a leader like him”.
Terrell has not commented. The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a comment request.
