A former Obama administration official and current CNN analyst, Juliette Kayyem, who yesterday called Kash Patel and the FBI “juvenile” for initially labeling the Boulder, Colorado, attack an act of terror, said today the government should look into why the attacker used Molotov cocktails over a gun.

“Look, these are relatively easy to make, but these are not guns, which in Colorado, as we know, are relatively easy to get,” Ms. Kayyem told CNN on Monday. “What was it about the Molotov cocktail? How did he learn to do it? How did he do three?” she asked.

A group of protesters who had assembled at Boulder to call for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas terrorists since the attacks of October 7, 2023, were allegedly ambushed by Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an illegal immigrant who is said to have thrown a Molotov cocktail and fired a makeshift flamethrower at the crowd. At least eight people were injured, including a Holocaust survivor. 

Yesterday, Ms. Kayyem, during an appearance on CNN with a former FBI deputy director, Andrew McCabe, criticized the FBI director, Kash Patel, for calling Mr. Soliman’s actions a “targeted terror attack.”

Mr. Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian national who was in America on an expired B1/B2 visa, was caught on video, shirtless and still holding Molotov cocktails, shouting, “Free Palestine,” “We have to end Zionists,” and, “They are killers.” 

“One elderly woman was so severely burned that her hair was charred and she wasn’t moving while others cared for her. Others were sitting/lying down in shock, some with their pants burned off, skin melted up their legs with their skin even split open and bleeding in some areas,” one witness wrote on X.

CNN is now being denounced on three fronts regarding its breaking news coverage of the event: for questioning the peaceful motives of the demonstrators who were attacked; for ignoring multiple reports — including verified video — that the alleged perpetrator was yelling anti-Israel remarks; and using an anti-Trump law enforcement analyst on CNN’s payroll to criticize Mr. Patel for calling the attack terrorism.

The attack occurred, in CNN’s initial reports, at a “‘peaceful’ pro-Israel demonstration.” Critics were quick to call out the network’s use of so-called air quotes that cast doubt on whether the protesters were actually peaceful. CNN also refused for hours to acknowledge that it was an act of terrorism, despite Mr. Soliman’s well-documented, videotaped rhetoric during the attack that was circulating online. CNN was also quick to criticize Mr. Patel’s decision to label it an act of “terror.”

“‘This is how legacy media reported an attack on people. This is what they do. They downplay the motive and refuse to report what the perpetrator said … every attempt is made to hide all the details. It’s systematic. It’s not just ‘whoops’ … it’s systematic,” a Middle East security analyst, Seth Frantzman, posted on X.

Run for Their Lives, the organizers of the June 1 event at Boulder, describes its gatherings as “family-friendly” events. An event has been held every Sunday since the attacks of October 7. Footage of a past protest shows a small procession of people, many of them elderly, holding up signs featuring the hostages and the Israeli flag.

The attack came on the same day that multiple liberal media outlets, including CNN and the Washington Post, ran unverified reports that Israeli troops had fired on Palestinians getting food aid, killing more than 20. The source of the report was Hamas — described by the Post as health officials. The IDF has strongly denied shooting and killing anyone.

“CNN spent the last week fabricating stories about Gaza humanitarian distributions, turning anti-Israel hysteria up to an ear-piercing pitch. Now they’re passively aggressively questioning whether the pro-Israel protesters set on fire by the Colorado terrorist were peaceful,” the legislative director for Senator Cruz, Omri Ceren, posted on X.

“Which @cnn editor signed off on the quotation marks? And what about the demonstration was not peaceful until the Molotov cocktails were thrown at the seniors?” Pershing Square’s CEO, Bill Ackman, wrote on X.

On Sunday, Mr. Patel described the event as a “targeted terror attack” against demonstrators, despite the Boulder chief of police’s initial hesitation to say whether it was such an attack. Mr. McCabe, a paid CNN contributor who was fired by President Trump in 2019 after an FBI review found he showed a “lack of candor,” jumped on CNN to criticize Mr. Patel’s initial, and ultimately accurate, determination regarding the attack. 

“This is the sort of thing that the FBI can help out the local police department with- providing manpower, technology and resources to do that sort of work. That’s what the FBI does. We don’t step in and take over and draw conclusions five minutes after the attack about what happened,” Mr. McCabe said. 

A FBI spokesman, Ben Williamson, responded to Mr. McCabe and CNN, telling them both on X to “Kick rocks.” 

“The guy shouted ‘Free Palestine’ while throwing fire bombs at a crowd of Jewish people. We correctly referred to an investigation of terrorism, will continue to do so, and we have zero interest in what either these CNN guests have to say,” Mr. Williamson wrote.

“Our events are meant to be quiet and peaceful,” Run for Their Lives writes on its website. For participants concerned about their safety, the organizers instruct them not to protest, not to disturb neighbors, and to be “polite and peaceful.”