Tarrant County’s top elected official held meeting with anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist

Update: This article has been updated to include a statement that Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare posted on social media Friday afternoon, and to include comments from Understanding the Threat founder John Guandolo.

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare held a meeting this spring with an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist whose organization offers “threat” training for law enforcement and elected officials about “communist & Jihadist networks.”

O’Hare’s calendar, which the Star-Telegram obtained through a public records request, includes a March 31 meeting with John Guandolo, a former FBI agent and the founder of the Dallas-based group Understanding the Threat. The organization has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

O’Hare’s communications director, Ruth Ray, said the judge was not available to comment Thursday but confirmed that the inclusion of the meeting on the judge’s calendar indicates that the meeting did take place.

“If it’s on there, I believe it happened,” Ray said. “If it’s on his calendar, it occurred.”

O’Hare and Guandolo were scheduled to meet for half an hour in O’Hare’s Southlake office.

The event on O’Hare’s calendar includes a note from Guandolo’s office that a third party had suggested “that a meeting with Judge O’Hare regarding understanding the threat of Communism and Islam Ideology in our current American system would be helpful to the Judge.”

On Friday afternoon, O’Hare posted a statement on Twitter, responding to the Star-Telegram’s reporting, which he called “incendiary.” In the statement, O’Hare said that the meeting included discussion of “terrorism, border security, and keeping the country safe.”

In the statement, O’Hare also said he has “met with hundreds of people across Tarrant County since taking office” and added that his office “doesn’t review an individual’s life history before placing the meeting on the Judge’s calendar.” He accused the Star-Telegram of “sensationalizing a 30-minute meeting about national and local security.”

Guandolo gained notoriety for blatantly inaccurate and Islamophobic remarks, including that all Muslims “share the same ideology as ISIS” and that “the purpose of Islam … is to wage war against non-muslims.” In an April 23 blog post, Guandolo wrote that the “communist and Islamic Movements ... are preparing for significant violence in the immediate future,” as early as Memorial Day.

“The groups and leaders involved are making preparations and calling for targeted violence against Christian Patriots while government officials give the green light for violent action,” Guandolo wrote.

Guandolo’s Twitter account was suspended in 2018 after he posted a tweet that tied the Democratic Party to the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Guandolo was accused in 2017 of assaulting a Minnesota sheriff; two years later, a Dallas County jury sided with the sheriff and awarded him more than half a million dollars in the case, The Dallas Morning News reported at the time.

Guandolo’s organization, Understanding the Threat, hosts “training programs” that aim to teach people about the perceived threat of “communist & Jihadist networks in the United States.” According to the group’s website, those trainings are designed for law enforcement officers and elected officials, among others.

Guandolo did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday. In a Friday evening phone call, however, Guandolo said that his perspectives are based in fact.

“What we publish and what we teach is factual,” Guandolo said.

Guandolo also said that there seems to be an assumption that he was “somehow saying that everybody who self-identifies as a Muslim is therefore bad. (I) never said that. I don’t believe that.”

Guandolo told the Star-Telegram that he received praise from national intelligence leaders for his research.

“The work that I’m doing through my company is a continuation of the work that I did in the FBI and in the Department of Defense,” he said.

Five years ago, Guandolo hosted a law enforcement training in San Angelo. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement then rejected the training because it “paints an entire religion with an overly broad brush” and “does not seem to provide any law enforcement training value to attendees,” according to the Texas Observer.

This isn’t the former FBI agent’s first foray into Tarrant County. In late 2018, the Tarrant County Republicans planned a six-hour event featuring Guandolo shortly before a vote on whether to remove a Muslim man from a party leadership position. The event was titled “Islam and Sharia Law versus the U.S. Constitution; are they Compatible?” the Star-Telegram reported at the time.

O’Hare, a Republican, stepped into Tarrant County’s top elected seat in January, marking a sharp turn to the right for the county’s politics. The judge has made headlines in recent weeks after the resignation of the county’s elections administrator, who cited a meeting with O’Hare and differing values as the reason for his resignation.