Tarrant County’s top elected official held meeting with anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist
Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare held a meeting this spring with an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist whose organization offers “threat” trainings 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.
It’s unclear what O’Hare and Guandolo discussed in their meeting. O’Hare’s communications director, Ruth Ray, said the judge was not available to comment for this story 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.”
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.”
O’Hare and Guandolo were scheduled to meet for half an hour in O’Hare’s Southlake office.
Guandolo did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday afternoon.
Guandolo has 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.”
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.
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.
