DHS: HAS NOT…REPEAT…NOT DETERMINE ANY TIES BETWEEN TUSCON SHOOTER AND AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

We are starting to wonder if the only bullets that Jared Taylor might have been associated with over the past weekend might have been the ones he was sweating when Fox News reported that a leaked Dept. of Homeland Security memo connected the suspect in the Tuscon, AZ shooting to his publication American Renaissance. After all, less than a month from now, his do-over conference will be held in Charlotte, NC and this just put the whole thing in a very bad spotlight. Yeah, we saw him and damned near every last white supremacist with a computer type out their displeasure at the DHS – not Fox News interestingly enough, despite the fact that it was them that made the memo public and not DHS. That’s the thing about leaks. They don’t always give you the whole story, just an idea of one. The DHS is now making it clear that  they have not made any such detemination as to the relation between Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged Tuscon shooter or Jared Taylor, the alleged human being.  But it’s not the suggestion that AmRen might have a connection to Loughner. It’s the fact that they are in the news and people are going to look at them more. Like it or not, they are still politically connected white supremacists, and anyone associated with them is going to have a hard time justifying it, and if they can’t people will see to it that they are never in polite company again. Which makes AmRen a bonafide third rail. See Mr. Taylor? You can still have your conference and get shut down at the same time!

The Plum Line

For the last 24 hours, the Web has been alive with speculation that the Arizona shooter has some sort of ties to a right-wing group called American Renaissance. The primary source for this claim is a Fox News report from yesterday saying that law enforcement had made this determination based on information provided by the Department of Homeland Security.

But a DHS official tells me that the department has not established any such possibility, undercutting what appears to be the primary basis for this claim.

Fox News’s report yesterday initially claimed that a DHS memo had outlined the possible connection, and defined American Renaissance as a “pro-white racist organization” that Jared Loughner “mentioned in some of his internet postings.” Fox later walked back the report a bit, sourcing the claim to “a law enforcement memo based on information provided by DHS.”

The Fox report caused a splash, with some news orgs reporting that anonymous officials had confirmed such possible ties. Some conservatives railed at DHS for supposedly trying to tie the shooter to the right for political reasons, and others disputed the suggestion that this displayed the shooter’s ideological leanings.

But DHS has not officially provided any such information to any law enforcement officials, the DHS official says.

“We have not established any such possible link,” the official says.

The official cautions it’s conceivable that a law enforcement official got unofficial info from a DHS official somewhere along the lines of what Fox reported. But he emphasizes that DHS has not even concluded in any official way that even the possibility of such ties exists. The official adds that it wouldn’t be DHS’s place to reach any such conclusion in the first place, since the FBI is leading the investigation.

Spokespeople for Fox didn’t immediately return an email for comment. For now, however, it looks like this could further complicate efforts to pin down the shooter’s beliefs.