McMaster says the Charlottesville car attack 'meets the definition of terrorism'

H.R. McMaster on NBC News

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said Sunday what President Trump so far has not: that the lethal vehicle attack on a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, Saturday was domestic terrorism.

"I certainly think any time that you commit an attack against people to incite fear, it is terrorism," McMaster told ABC host George Stephanopoulos. "It meets the definition of terrorism."

"But what this is, what you see here," he continued, "is you see someone who is a criminal who is committing a criminal act against fellow Americans — a criminal act that may have been motivated, and we'll see what's turned up in this investigation, by this hatred and bigotry which I mentioned we have to extinguish in our nation."

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Watch a clip of McMaster making similar remarks on NBC News below. Bonnie Kristian

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.