Last week's attack on New Orleans' Bourbon Street shows the "absolute necessity" of restoring monitoring activities that have gone by the wayside over the past four years with President Joe Biden in office, former Rep. Pete King said Sunday.
"We've certainly cut back on surveillance," the New York Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend." "You hear the president say that the greatest threat to the country is white nationalism and not a word said about the many, many ISIS operatives who are here in the country, the Hezbollah operatives."
Such people must be stopped before they can launch attacks, "and you can only do that by active surveillance, active monitoring," King added. "My concern is we're not doing that … we have to get lean and mean and be very tough in monitoring and stopping and preempting terrorist attacks."
King said he is also concerned about the mixed response in the hours after Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran, plowed into a crowd of New Year's Day revelers, killing 14 and injuring dozens more.
"What happened in New Orleans was like one big story after another," King said. "First it was not terrorism, then it was terrorism with accomplices, then it was terrorism with no accomplices," he said.
Meanwhile, former Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., also on Sunday's show, commented that there are still many questions concerning the attack in New Orleans and a separate incident in Las Vegas, where Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, died in an explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump-owned hotel.
"What would radicalize two seemingly patriotic men to do such a heinous act?" he said.
He also said he wanted to know why the FBI had such mixed messaging in New Orleans, considering Jabbar's truck had an ISIS flag on it.
"This is the same intelligence community that's telling us over and over again, if you see something, say something, but you don't have any faith in them anymore," he said. "All of this has to be tightened up … we're going to continue to have these mega-events and people need to know that they're going to be safe."
King also called for constant monitoring as ISIS and al-Qaida are still "fixated on destroying the United States."
And the FBI, with its first response that the New Orleans attack wasn't terrorism-related, showed the FBI agent there in charge was "unprepared."
"New Orleans is a target with Bourbon Street," he said. "It's a national landmark. And for her to be so uninformed and to be so reckless, to say this is not terrorism, to me, that's like counterterrorism 101. You don't say that and you shouldn't believe that. The first thought should have been, This could well have been terrorism."
King also spoke out Sunday about Friday's vote to reelect House Speaker Mike Johnson, who squeaked out a narrow win.
"You have to have a united leadership, and you're not going to get anybody more conservative than Mike Johnson," he said. "You have guys who want everything to be exactly the way they want it to be. It's their way or the highway. It's a terrible way to govern. We've got to get behind Mike Johnson."
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!
- Find Newsmax channel in your home via cable and satellite systems – More Info Here
- Watch Newsmax+ on your home TV app or smartphone and watch it anywhere! Try it for FREE – See More Here: NewsmaxPlus.com
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.