The message was from a man Stevens had known as a teenager. Before Stevens joined the Army, he’d had a turbulent childhood, living in group homes in California and getting in trouble for drug use. As a result of failing drug tests as a teenager, Stevens had been ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. That was where he met Angelo Sultana, the tall, imposing man who had contacted him. Sultana “was this figure there,” Stevens remembered. “He was loud, boisterous, and very aggressive. When he entered a room, he would talk and people would quiet. He was that sort of person.”

By 2012, Sultana was a member of the Northern California State Militia. On Facebook, he asked Stevens to come to California and train him and his friends in sniper techniques. A private right-wing group, the Northern California State Militia conducts military-style tactical training and disaster-response exercises and organizes social events for members. Stevens doesn’t know exactly how Sultana knew about his sniper training; he may have posted something on Facebook about his sniper competitions, he said, or perhaps Sultana had read a story that the U.S. Army had published about him.

Stevens found Sultana’s invitation concerning. Sultana had been convicted in 1986 of voluntary manslaughter in the beating death a 22-year-old musician. Stevens called the FBI and left a message. An FBI agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and was assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force responded, asking Stevens to accept Sultana’s invitation and report back to the FBI about what Sultana said. That is, to become an FBI informant.

At the FBI’s behest, Stevens met with Sultana over several months, and in Sultana’s living room, Stevens gave him and his friends tips for using a sniper rifle. Stevens reported back to the FBI on the type of sniper training Sultana requested and the kinds of guns he had. In April 2014, the FBI arrested Sultana on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Posts Sultana wrote on a militia website suggested that he was preparing for a coming war. “I come with fear, my children do not deserve what I believe is coming. If it’s to be a fight, I won’t start it, I’ll do my damnest (sic) to finish it,” he wrote, according to court records. Sultana, who did not respond to requests to comment for this story, ultimately pleaded guilty to the firearms charge and served five years of probation.

What came next was increasingly ominous for Stevens, whose firsthand view of how federal law enforcement can investigate Americans based solely on ideology left him disillusioned with the government he’d served for nearly five years in the Army. After Sultana’s arrest, the FBI asked Stevens to keep spying on the militia without apparent probable cause. For the next four years, Stevens attended Northern California State Militia meetings and trainings, all of which were advertised publicly on Facebook, including meet-and-greets and family walks. Stevens tracked attendees and locations on his own initiative using an online mapping program whose data he shared with The Intercept; he then used that data to write reports for the FBI.

“I was just a human recording machine paid by the government to go into people’s lives and befriend them and find out what they were thinking.”

The FBI refused to comment specifically about Stevens’s work for the bureau or officially claim him as having been one of its more than 15,000 informants. That’s the bureau’s longstanding policy: to neither confirm nor deny an informant. Stevens’s story is supported by email exchanges with FBI agents and copies of intelligence reports he wrote for the FBI. “We are grateful for everything you have done for our organization, the military, and this country,” FBI agent Matthew Stanger, one of Stevens’s handlers, wrote in a June 2018 email. In addition, a retired U.S. Army officer confirmed in an interview with The Intercept that Stevens had described to him his work with the FBI as it was happening.

Amid growing concerns about white supremacist and far-right violence, current and former Justice Department and FBI officials have often claimed that federal law enforcement does not have adequate authority to investigate right-wing domestic terrorism threats. But Stevens’s infiltration of the militia shows the wide leeway the FBI has to use informants when investigating citizens based on their ideological beliefs.

The more time Stevens spent with the militia members, the more he began to question why he was there at all. Some of these people seemed to have mental illnesses and a few of them were racists, he told the FBI, but no one was committing crimes in his presence.

“Why are you having me do this instead of a federal agent who would be clearly more qualified and maybe more appropriately suited for this position?” Stevens remembered asking Stanger.

Stanger’s response was quick, Stevens recalled: “With you, we avoid a lot of red tape.”

“To me, red tape, as I’ve learned in the government, is set up for a reason,” Stevens told The Intercept. “Why aren’t they following that red tape? Did he mean just internal regulations? Or did he mean I could do the work without a warrant?”

The FBI declined to comment about the statement Stevens recalled hearing from Stanger.

“I was just a human recording machine paid by the government to go into people’s lives and befriend them and find out what they were thinking,” Stevens said.

Since the Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, in which a white supremacist killed 22 and injured 24, calls for new domestic terrorism laws have grown louder. Facing public pressure to respond to the apparent rise of white supremacist violence, the FBI has touted a rash of arrests of violent right-wing extremists who allegedly were plotting attacks. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, has proposed a bill that would expand domestic terrorism laws, and three Texas congressional representatives — Republicans Michael McCaul and Randy Weber and Democrat Henry Cuellar — have put forth a similar bipartisan effort.

The FBI has not offered an official response on whether the bureau needs new laws to combat domestic terrorists, but Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said during an April event at the Council on Foreign Relations that he was open to accepting expanded anti-terrorism powers. “We always like having more tools,” Wray said. “That makes us more versatile and more effective. So I would never be one to turn down the offer of new weapons in the fight.”

But, as Stevens’s informant work demonstrates, investigations of right-wing extremists depend not on new laws, but on internal decisions at the FBI on how to allocate resources and where to target powers that allow for broad surveillance and investigation of potential public safety threats.

“I think the bureau looked at me as this element that didn’t cost very much money, but was gathering intelligence in a fashion that the military would on an enemy force,” Stevens said.

While Stevens was still investigating Sultana, he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army due to an unrelated back injury. He moved from the Washington, D.C., area to Phoenix to attend Arizona State University, where, in July 2014, he received another call from the FBI. Stanger asked if Stevens would come back to California to help investigate the militia with which Sultana allegedly associated. Stevens was hesitant, but Stanger appealed to his patriotism. The message: Help protect your country.

For the next four years, Stevens traveled back and forth from Arizona to California to attend Northern California State Militia meetings and trainings. During his approximately six years of work as an informant, Stevens said the FBI paid him about $30,000, much of it to reimburse his travel expenses. He attended about 20 militia meetings and trainings throughout California.

“I was just there to maybe, if they started speaking about their path to violence, that I could just follow them down that path,” Stevens said. “So after doing that time and time again, there was just nothing actionable, and I would think, Why after a year or so of me doing that didn’t they stop it? It seemed to increase as time went forward, and they just weren’t getting any actionable intelligence.”

Stevens’s infiltration of militia groups appears to contradict the FBI’s persistent claims that federal law enforcement does not investigate Americans based on ideology alone. Wray, the FBI director, emphasized this in a July 23 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Our focus is on the violence. We, the FBI, do not investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant,” Wray told the senators. “We investigate violence. And any extremist ideology, when it turns to violence, we’re all over it.”

Of course, since 9/11, the FBI has regularly investigated ideology and found adequate, if controversial, authorities to do so, with a particularly large loophole available in its vast roster of informants. The FBI’s deployment of informants to investigate Muslims, based solely on their religious affiliation, has been documented nationwide. The American Civil Liberties Union has been battling the FBI in court since 2011 over a case involving FBI informant Craig Monteilh, who spied on Muslim worshippers throughout Southern California. The Justice Department was so eager to quash the case after it was filed that then-Attorney General Eric Holder asserted the “state secrets” privilege. In that case, as in the militia investigations Stevens worked on, the FBI did not appear to have reason to suspect any of the surveillance targets were committing crimes.

As The Intercept reported in the 2017 series “The FBI’s Secret Rules,” which was based on leaked policy documents, FBI agents must obtain supervisory approval to enter a group or gathering using an undercover agent, and to obtain that approval, the FBI must have a “predicate,” or a factual basis to suspect criminal activity. But neither supervisory approval nor a predicate is required if the work is done by an informant, creating a loophole that allows the FBI to investigate Americans for virtually any reason.

Neither supervisory approval nor a predicate is required if the work is done by an informant, creating a loophole that allows the FBI to investigate Americans for virtually any reason.

In addition to the informant loophole, the FBI may authorize so-called assessments, which allow FBI agents to open an investigation of anyone without probable cause for national security purposes. Although the law does not dictate a time constraint for assessments, FBI policy limits these intrusive investigations to 72 hours unless probable cause can be established during the assessment.

When he was working as an FBI informant, Stevens wasn’t aware of the informant loophole, but he was nonetheless baffled at the time by the fact that the FBI, with all its highly trained agents around the country, kept bringing him to California to spy on militia events.

So far, aside from a series of high-profile arrests in the days immediately after the El Paso shooting, there’s little to suggest that the FBI is placing threats from right-wing and other domestic extremists on the same level as threats from extremists inspired by Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other international ideologies.

In his July testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Wray said that “jihadist-inspired violence” remains the greatest terrorist threat in the United States — even though he acknowledged that in the first three quarters of this fiscal year, arrests of domestic terrorists, most of whom were white supremacists, roughly equaled the number of international terrorism-related arrests.

Getting straight answers from the FBI on the number of domestic terrorism cases it is investigating at any given time, and how that corresponds with the number of domestic terrorism arrests the bureau has made, can be a baffling task. In August, ProPublica requested records to support an FBI claim that agents had arrested 90 domestic terrorists in the previous nine months. The FBI told ProPublica that the number came from a compilation of press releases, but then refused to provide the releases. Available press releases about domestic terrorism arrests during that period of time came nowhere near the 90 the FBI claimed, according to ProPublica’s review of online records.

Of the bureau’s 5,000 currently open terrorism investigations, just 850 are related to domestic terrorism.

During a testimony in May before the House Homeland Security Committee, FBI Assistant Director Mike McGarrity admitted that the bureau devotes considerably fewer resources to domestic terrorism than international terrorism. Two of every 10 counterterrorism agents are assigned to investigating domestic threats, McGarrity testified. In a prepared statement, the FBI’s press office told The Intercept that of the bureau’s 5,000 currently open terrorism investigations, just 850 are related to domestic terrorism.

Adding to the overall perplexity in this area is that the FBI has reconfigured its domestic terrorist threat categories in a way that appears to deemphasize white supremacist violence. For more than a decade, the FBI used 11 categories to describe domestic terrorist threats, with white supremacists being one of them. The FBI recently reduced those categories to four, with white supremacists folded into a new category titled “racially motivated violent extremism.” The new category includes so-called black identity extremists — a term the FBI coined, and has since claimed to have abandoned, for a supposed ideology among some black extremists that violence against law enforcement officers is justified. But this new category does not appear to be a broad one that includes multiple types of “racially motivated violent extremism.” An FBI document from last year obtained by The Young Turks includes language that suggests this new category includes only white supremacists and so-called black identity extremists.

When Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, pressed the FBI director in his July Senate testimony about what effect folding white supremacists into the new category would have on the FBI’s investigative priorities, Wray avoided the question by using the official line that the FBI, as a matter of policy, investigates violence, not ideology.

Michael German, a former FBI undercover agent who investigated white supremacists and is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, has criticized what he views as the FBI’s recent lackluster efforts to investigate white supremacists while simultaneously claiming to need new powers to do the job.

“The FBI and federal prosecutors already have all the authority they need to address white supremacist violence proactively when they are feeling the pressure to act,” German said, pointing to the string of high-profile arrests after the El Paso shooting.

“When they properly prioritize cases involving deadly violence, rather than chasing environmentalists or other protest groups engaging in civil disobedience, they can be effective,” he said. “This public pressure is essential, as current and former Justice Department officials seem more interested in using these recent tragedies to claim greater counterterrorism powers than in changing the longstanding Justice Department policies that de-prioritize the investigation and prosecution of white supremacist violence.”

Stevens ultimately quit the FBI.

He had grown concerned by the agents’ continuing requests for him to investigate people who weren’t breaking laws, and his mental health and grades at Arizona State began to suffer. He had started to suspect that new people entering his life might be informants themselves. It got worse when an FBI agent who had accompanied Stanger for a meeting said that if Stevens disappeared, they’d start knocking on doors to look for him. Although the comment may have been meant as an assurance that the bureau would take care of him, Stevens viewed it as menacing.

He emailed Stanger, his handler, and said he was done. He also expressed concern that the FBI was spying on him, just as he’d been spying on other people without cause.

“I want to let you know that in no way whatsoever did our organization deploy anyone, in any way, into your life — ever, let alone in the last eight months,” Stanger wrote, adding: “We have never, and will never check on you.”

After breaking with the FBI, Stevens left the country to travel the world and live off his modest Army pension. He was in Southeast Asia when the El Paso attack occurred. From there, he read about U.S. government officials asking for more powers to investigate right-wing extremists — something he couldn’t reconcile with the years he’d spent investigating California militia members without probable cause.

“I have the feeling the government is in the same sort of position that they were in post-9/11, reacting to a new type of threat and searching for solutions,” Stevens said. “They don’t need any more power than they already have with their nationwide collection of informants that can walk into somebody’s house and record them. What more do they need?”

The post Informant Reveals FBI’s Already Vast Powers to Investigate Right-Wing Extremists appeared first on The Intercept.

“Lots and lots of coughing, folks,” a woman recording the video says, alluding to a right-wing conspiracy theory that people from Mexico and Central America are carrying infectious diseases. “This is what’s coming across our border. How bad does it get before we actually build the wall?”

“We’re just allowing people from all over the world to rush our borders,” a militiaman behind her says. “Bottom line, you got to support Donald Trump. He’s the only guy telling the truth.”

In response to the video — which was recorded on April 16, posted on social media and YouTube the next day, and then broadcast by major news networks — the American Civil Liberties Union urged U.S. and New Mexico authorities not to allow “racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum.”

Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general, admonished the militia members, who call themselves the United Constitutional Patriots. “These individuals should not attempt to exercise authority reserved for law enforcement,” he wrote in a statement.

Three days after the video appeared online, the U.S. government seemed to take action. Larry Hopkins, the Patriots’ leader, was arrested and charged in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico with being a felon in possession of firearms. News reports suggested a cause-and-effect relationship between the immigrant roundup and the arrest. “This militia group detained migrants at the border,” a CNN headline read. “Then their leader got arrested.”

But while outrage generated by the video may have driven the government to arrest Hopkins, the charge against him has nothing to do with kidnapping terrified people and their children at gunpoint. In fact, the charge against Hopkins relates to an incident that occurred more than 18 months earlier, when FBI agents found the militia leader with a cache of weapons and suspected him of plotting to kill Democratic Party leaders and funders. At the time, federal officials chose not to charge Hopkins. The FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment about the investigation or the timing of Hopkins’s prosecution.

Hopkins’s case is emblematic of how the FBI and federal prosecutors often treat right-wing extremists, ignoring offenses or bringing lesser charges for crimes that would almost certainly result in aggressive federal prosecutions if they were committed by other types of extremists.

Take the case of Christopher Daniels, an African-American gun rights advocate, who came to the FBI’s attention around the same time Hopkins did. The FBI raided both men’s homes within months of each other and, in both cases, found weapons they had reason to believe should not have been there. But in Hopkins’s case, the FBI decided merely to confiscate the guns and wait 18 months before doing anything else, whereas in Daniels’s, the FBI quickly arrested him.

While Hopkins remained free to terrorize immigrants, Daniels was jailed for five months, losing his home and his job.

The primary difference between them wasn’t just race, but ideology. Federal agents appeared to make a clear decision to view Hopkins, a right-wing militia leader, as less dangerous than Daniels, a supposed “black identity extremist.” The term was coined by the FBI Counterterrorism Division to describe a supposed ideology based on the theory that police brutality against African-Americans justifies retaliatory violence. Critics have questioned whether “black identity extremism” exists at all, describing it as “fiction” and “fantasy.”

This double standard is common in federal prosecutions. An Intercept analysis earlier this year found that right-wing extremists are rarely prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws, even when their crimes meet the federal definition of terrorism. Since the 9/11 attacks, just 34 right-wing extremists have been charged under anti-terrorism laws, compared to more than 500 alleged international terrorists, according to The Intercept’s analysis.

In fact, if not for the video of the United Constitutional Patriots and the anger it sparked, Hopkins might never have been charged at all.

Militia “Commander” Gets an Initial Pass

The Lakeside Ranch Trailer Park is in Flora Vista, New Mexico, about 180 miles north of Albuquerque near the Colorado border. Locals had reported to the FBI in October 2017 that the trailer park was the “base” for the United Constitutional Patriots and that as many as 20 militia members, armed with AK-47 rifles and other firearms, would gather there. Hopkins, the so-called commander of the militia, lived in a mobile home inside the park.

Hopkins told people that his group was training to assassinate George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama because of their supposed support for antifa, a collection of anti-fascist groups, according to an FBI report that does not specify the source for this information.

Two months after receiving information about the apparent assassination plots, FBI agents knocked on Hopkins’s door. Hopkins invited them into a room he called his office; the federal agents saw firearms in the closet. Since Hopkins has prior convictions — his offenses include possessing a loaded firearm in Michigan in 1996, pretending to be a police officer in Oregon in 2006, and failing to pay nearly $70,000 in child support in South Dakota in 2011 — he was not permitted to own firearms.

But Hopkins told the FBI agents that the guns weren’t his. Instead, he said, they belonged to his common-law wife, Fay Sanders Murphy. He agreed to allow the FBI to search the home, and as the agents walked through, Hopkins showed them where the guns were kept. From his statements, which the agents recorded, Hopkins seemed to know a lot about weapons that he purported were not his.

“The shotgun is loaded, so I will let you unload it,” he told the agents when presenting one of the guns to them.

Indeed, Hopkins knew where all the guns were and which ones were loaded. He pointed to a black tactical vest. Holstered in the vest was a 9mm handgun. “That’s my black [handgun] right there, and it is loaded,” Hopkins said.

The agents confiscated nine guns and various kinds of ammunition and left. Hopkins wasn’t charged with a crime until more than 18 months later, on April 20, after his vigilante border patrol caught the public’s attention and the Justice Department came under pressure to respond. Following Hopkins’s arrest, the remaining members of the United Constitutional Patriots started calling themselves the Guardian Patriots.

Black Activist Charged After Similar Raid

Two months after the raid on Hopkins’s home, federal agents wearing bulletproof vests busted open the door of the Dallas apartment where Christopher Daniels lived.

Daniels came to the FBI’s attention after Infowars, Alex Jones’s right-wing conspiracy-mongering website, posted a video that showed him at a rally in Austin, Texas, where Infowars is based, protesting police brutality. Daniels was not secretive about his interest in guns. He had co-founded two gun ownership organizations: one that promoted weapons training and community service, and another that advocated for citizens to carry firearms.

But since Daniels had been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence in Tennessee, agents believed that his possession of a gun would be illegal under federal law. While investigating Daniels after the Infowars video was posted, FBI agents learned that he was traveling to Detroit to attend a firearms training. Daniels was not hiding anything; in fact, agents discovered his plans because he’d posted flyers for the training on his Facebook page. The FBI then confirmed that Daniels had checked in a firearm for his flight to Detroit and his return flight to Dallas.

When Daniels returned from Detroit, the FBI raided his apartment and seized a .38 special handgun and an assault rifle with a fully loaded magazine, as well as ammunition.

FBI agents normally wouldn’t concern themselves with someone like Daniels, but at his detention hearing, prosecutors leaned on “black identity extremism” as way of claiming that Daniels was dangerous. They submitted as exhibits inflammatory posts that Daniels — who goes by the name Rakem Balogun — had written on Facebook. These included posts about Micah Xavier Johnson, who ambushed police officers in Dallas in 2016, killing five and injuring nine. “Today one year ago one Black Man brought Dallas Pig Department to their knees,” Daniels wrote.

A federal judge dismissed the charges against Daniels in May 2018, finding that the federal firearms law did not apply to his domestic assault conviction in Tennessee. The federal law prohibits defendants who have been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence offenses — defined in the federal statute as the attempted use of physical force or threatened use of a deadly weapon — from possessing firearms. But Daniels was convicted under a Tennessee law that more broadly defines domestic violence as causing “another to reasonably fear imminent bodily injury.” Since the Tennessee definition of domestic violence was more expansive than the federal one, Daniels couldn’t be prosecuted under the federal firearms statute, the judge ruled.

“We Know We’re Not Doing Enough”

Michael McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director for the Counterterrorism Division, testified on June 4 before the House Oversight Committee that the FBI has quietly retired the “black identity extremism” label for defendants such as Daniels.

“The designation no longer exists?” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat from Massachusetts, pressed McGarrity after he made the statement.

“It hasn’t existed since I’ve been here for 17 months,” McGarrity answered, referring to the length of his assignment to the Counterterrorism Division.

Meanwhile, the FBI and other federal agencies are still trying to develop a plan to combat white supremacist and other right-wing extremist violence in the United States, counterterrorism officials acknowledged in the Congressional hearing. Elizabeth Neumann, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that her agency is working on “a prevention framework” to be rolled out in the coming years. “We know we’re not doing enough,” Neumann admitted.

The FBI’s comparatively gentle treatment of Hopkins comes as the right-wing conspiracy theories that appear to have influenced him — such as the loony notions that financier Soros is supporting antifa and that immigrants are bringing diseases and widespread crime to the United States — have inspired a series of domestic terrorism plots and attacks since Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

“I think FBI agents and analysts tend to view someone like [Daniels] as a direct threat to them and their law enforcement partners, but they don’t see the same from nativist militants like Hopkins,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Instead, they see these nativist militants targeting the groups they are looking at as lawbreakers.”

The FBI assessment of so-called black identity extremists inflated the threat to law enforcement, German said, while a paper the agency released around the same time on white supremacist violence took a much more moderate approach, identifying it as, in German’s summation, “a persistent but manageable threat.”

“This conclusion ignores the evidence that far-right groups often end up targeting law enforcement,” German said.

The post FBI’s Leniency Toward Border Vigilante Contrasts With Harsh Treatment of “Black Identity Extremist” appeared first on The Intercept.

A slender young man with glasses and a mustache got out carrying a sledgehammer. His accomplice, a pudgy man with a dimpled chin and a wide gap between his two front teeth, followed carrying a black powder bomb.

As the second man, 29-year-old Michael McWhorter, would later tell the FBI, they had a message for the mosque’s worshippers: “You’re not welcome here. Get the fuck out.”

The man with the sledgehammer, 22-year-old Joe Morris, used it to smash one of the mosque’s windows. McWhorter then raised his hand to hurl the bomb. As he did, he saw a man inside the house of worship. Their eyes met as McWhorter released the explosive. He and Morris ran back to the truck, where another man waited behind the wheel. They sped off into the night.

“We were long gone before it went off,” McWhorter later told the FBI.

No one was hurt in the bombing, but the mosque was badly damaged. President Donald Trump and his aides refused to condemn the attack. Sebastian Gorka, then a deputy assistant to Trump, suggested that it could have been a false flag operation carried out by leftists but designed to make right-wing extremists look responsible.

Gorka’s skepticism appears to have been misplaced. Seven months later, the FBI and local police descended on Clarence, Illinois, a tiny ramshackle community surrounded by wind turbines, and arrested McWhorter, Morris, and two others – McWhorter’s stepson Ellis “EJ” Mack and Michael Hari, the man who had driven the getaway car — for their roles in the bombings of the Minnesota mosque and a women’s clinic in Illinois. McWhorter and Mack told the FBI that Hari was the group’s leader.

Hari had much in common with alleged domestic extremists like Cesar Sayoc Jr., Taylor Michael Wilson, and Robert Bowers, who appear to have been influenced by Trump’s promotion of xenophobia and nativism. He and fellow members of his small, violent group, the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia, wanted to return the United States to a simpler, less progressive era through bombings and armed resistance, according to his manifesto. Hari’s bizarre life story — involving a troubled marriage, antiquated and austere religious observances, and finally an embrace of bigotry and violence — illustrates how our increasingly divisive, conspiracy-laden culture isn’t creating terrorists so much as pushing troubled people toward extremism and violence.

Hari was drawn to Trump as a candidate because Trump wanted to put American culture in reverse, friends and family members told The Intercept. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan spoke to the nativism favored by Hari and some other conservative Christians, and fueled simmering hatred of a changing culture they struggled to understand — one in which women were empowered, gender could be fluid, a black man was president, and Christianity wasn’t necessarily a cornerstone belief.

“This whole Donald Trump movement caught a lot of us,” said a man who knew Hari through their shared religious observance but asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to be associated with Hari’s alleged crimes. “Anybody with a fundamentalist mindset has this ‘we-have-to-keep-our-ways, this-way-is-threatened’ mentality. They look at Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and it’s a lot of what they’re saying.”

“I don’t think Trump’s rhetoric is getting people to commit violence,” the man continued. “It’s not like he’s saying, ‘Go bomb a mosque!’ I think it’s subtler. I think he’s flipping the switch in certain people. And I think he flipped that switch in Michael Hari.”

In this July 2017 booking photo released by the Ford County Sheriff’s Office, Michael Hari is seen on an assault charge.

A Gradual Drift Toward Extremism

Michael Hari was born in Berlin in 1971 while his father was stationed there with the Air Force. He moved to Paxton, Illinois, with his parents and his younger brother when he was a boy. A rural corn and soybean farming community, Paxton is the seat of Ford County, which is shaped like the letter L and known as Illinois’s staunchest Republican county. In most elections, Libertarian Party candidates get more votes in Ford County than Democrats — when there is even a Democrat on the ballot.

In 1990, when Hari was 19, he married Michelle Lee Frakes, who hoped to become a school teacher. Two years later, they moved to Lampasas County, Texas, so Hari could study psychology at the University of Central Texas, now known as Texas A&M – Central Texas.

During Hari’s first year in Texas, David Koresh, the self-appointed prophet of a Christian sect known as the Branch Davidians, was gaining national attention. Law enforcement officials suspected Koresh of polygamy and child sexual abuse. Koresh’s group entered into a standoff with the federal government at a compound in Waco, about 100 miles from where Hari lived. Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, suspecting that Koresh and his followers had illegal weapons, tried to raid the compound in February 1993, leading to a shootout that killed four federal agents and six Branch Davidians. The FBI then surrounded Koresh’s compound in a 51-day standoff. Hari was deeply sympathetic to Koresh’s cause and viewed the standoff and later siege as the acts of a tyrannical government that did not respect religious liberty. He was among those who protested against the government in Waco. Some protesters at the time held up signs that read, “Is your church ATF approved?”

Hari’s support for Koresh was partly influenced by his own religious transformation. While in Texas, he began reading about the Old German Baptist Brethren, a conservative branch of Anabaptism whose members dress in a fashion similar to the Mennonites and the Amish: bearded men in pants, long-sleeved shirts, and fedoras and women in loose-fitting, long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses with bonnets covering their hair.

In Texas, Hari and Frakes had two daughters, but their marriage was tumultuous. Frakes took issue with what she saw as Hari’s oppressive and patriarchal religious beliefs. “I’m supposed to bow down to you,” Frakes once told him. “I can’t do it.”

In 1995, Frakes returned to Illinois with their daughters. Hari followed, landing a job as a deputy at the Ford County Sheriff’s Office, but the couple couldn’t mend their marriage. Frakes filed for divorce, beginning what would be a messy, yearslong dispute. One daughter accused Hari of sexually abusing her, but a court found that she had been coached. Frakes and Hari eventually reconciled, and the divorce proceedings were dropped.

Hari left the Ford County Sheriff’s Office in 1997, opened a gun store in Paxton, and tried his hand at politics. He ran for local sheriff unsuccessfully in 1998 as a Libertarian and a year later lost a race for a Paxton City Council seat. Hari won enough public recognition in those campaigns to be appointed to the Ford County Board of Review, which hears appeals of property tax assessments, but he resigned in 2000, halfway through his two-year term. “My church is against involvement in politics,” Hari told the local newspaper, the News-Gazette, at the time. “I’m 100 percent in favor of being against that. I don’t have any interest in getting involved in politics again.”

By then, Hari had become even more religiously devout, which caused more problems for his marriage. He had stripped the family’s home in Clarence, Illinois, of most vestiges of modern life. There was no electricity, just kerosene lamps for light and a wood-burning stove for heat. Frakes didn’t want to live like that, she wrote in court filings. New child abuse allegations surfaced against Hari, only to be dismissed as not credible by an administrative law judge with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Hari filed for divorce in February 2001 and won sole custody of his two daughters. At the time, a therapist noted Hari’s “somewhat unconventional religious beliefs” but found “no conflict with good parenting principles.”

Over the next four years, Hari and Frakes argued in court proceedings over parenting and education decisions. One of their daughters, Mollie, then 14, often missed school and was diagnosed with agoraphobia. Hari made her wear long dresses and bonnets. Frakes alleged that Mollie’s behavioral problems were rooted in her having to straddle modern culture in school and her father’s conservative religious beliefs at home.

Halfway through the school year in 2004, Mollie had missed 50 percent of her scheduled days. In April 2005, Frakes requested an emergency custody hearing, arguing that Hari had failed to keep the kids in public school. Hari didn’t show up. Instead, he left the country, taking his two daughters with him.

Austerity in Fountain Creek

Hari took Mollie and her younger sister, Alleen, to Belize, where Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Mennonites, had established a community. Back in Illinois, prosecutors charged him with felony child abduction.

Desperate to reunite with her daughters, Frakes turned to psychologist Phil McGraw, best known as the host of the TV talk show “Dr. Phil.” As part of a 2006 episode intended to reunite the family and offer counseling, the show hired Harold Copus, a former FBI agent, to track down Hari and the girls. Copus learned of the Hutterite community in Belize, and he and a film crew traveled there.

“It was like stepping back into the 1800s,” Copus recalled in an interview with The Intercept. “Everything’s horse-driven, no electricity, no modern conveniences whatsoever.”

Copus met with the community’s elders and explained that Hari did not have his ex-wife’s permission to take the girls out of the country. Copus then was shown to the house where Hari and his daughters were living. “It was a piece of crap,” Copus remembered.

Nearly a year after they left the United States, Hari agreed that he and his daughters would accompany Copus on a flight to Florida, where they filmed an episode of “Dr. Phil” that reunited Hari’s daughters with their mother. Hari then stood trial for child abduction in Illinois, where Frakes urged the court to send him to prison. “He believes his freedom of religion allows him to break the law,” Frakes told the court. Hari was found guilty and sentenced to 30 months of probation.

Starting in the mid-2000s, Hari began to believe that if the U.S. could not change, people like him would have to form new, independent communities grounded in conservative moral and religious beliefs.

He began to self-publish books and essays linked together by the notion that modernity has ruined American culture and family life. He blamed significant changes in public opinion about same-sex marriage on “nothing more than 20 years of campaigning by the secular global elite,” and predicted that same-sex marriage would soon create widespread social unrest in the United States. Hari believed that Americans had begun to accept same-sex marriage because churches had started to condone a “hedonistic view of marriage” between men and women that allowed for the pursuit of materialism and sexual pleasure at the expense of having children. In Hari’s view, changing attitudes about marriage, coupled with growing secularism nationwide, had ushered in an era when couples have fewer children and instead feed their “carnal desire for a higher standard of living.” In Hari’s view, Christianity, and the United States by extension, faced three enemies: the so-called global secular elite, Islam, and what he termed “false Christianity.” Hari viewed the “global secular elite” as an organized and unified cabal, and referred to it by the acronym “GSE.”

“To truly be more than conquerors, let us lay every other weapon aside, and turn our efforts to seizing the education of children away from the GSE,” Hari wrote. “Let us consider Islam to be a problem that we as Christians are equipped to handle. Let us confront every sin, false religion and heresy that we see with patient rebuke. Let us esteem other men better than ourselves, and go into battles as the Christians of old did, until we have cast down the devil’s strongholds and made every enemy our Savior’s friend. And then we will be more than conquerors.”

Hari came to see the social degradation all around him. He wrote about a case he helped investigate as a sheriff’s deputy in 1997, when the skulls of local town pioneers James and Elizabeth Jones were stolen by a group of people in their late teens and early 20s. Hari described the group as “cultists” and wrote that their crime was fueled by their use of marijuana and LSD. Instead of seeing them as young people experimenting with drugs and stealing remains for whatever ridiculous reason they thought justified their actions, Hari viewed the group and their behavior as symptomatic of a declining society that had wrongly embraced modernity and multiculturalism.

“What can we learn ultimately from this story?” Hari asked in his book’s final pages. “I would say that the culture and society that produced the [Joneses] is superior to the one we have now. Those cultists were products of the progressive movement. That is what it generates.”

Starting in the mid-2000s, Hari, who at the time was still apolitical, began to believe firmly that if the United States could not change, people like him would have to form new, independent communities grounded in conservative moral and religious beliefs. These communities would be more agrarian and communal, the way America once had been, at least in Hari’s mind. In 2006, he wrote a short manifesto titled “Fountain Creek.” Building on his experience in Belize, he espoused the creation of an Old German Baptist Brethren community founded on three principles: the “common purse,” in which the community pools its money; using simple tools, such as a horse-drawn plow instead of a tractor; and performing hard labor to produce food. Hari distributed and promoted his manifesto throughout the Anabaptist communities in the United States, then set off to put his ideas into practice. He leased a small farm outside Zaragoza, Mexico, a poor agricultural community about 60 miles south of Del Rio, Texas, where he planned to start his new society. Google Maps still labels the farm in Mexico as “Fountain Creek Old German Baptist Brethren.”

Michael Hari described his farm and farmhouses in Mexico as developed and livable. An Old German Baptist Brethren family that joined him there discovered that wasn't the case. Photos obtained by The Intercept

The property was in disrepair; drug cartels had used part of the farm as a burning pit for bodies. Hari went there with Joe Morris, the man who would allegedly smash the Minnesota mosque’s window with a sledgehammer. Growing up in Illinois, Morris had shuffled between foster parents and grandparents before Hari had taken him to a horse-and-buggy community in Kentucky to be raised, according to people who knew both men. To Morris — who would later become part of the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia — Hari was something of a father figure.

Only one other family joined Hari and Morris at Fountain Creek. The patriarch, the affable man who blamed Trump’s rhetoric for Hari’s radicalization, said he’d dreamed of a simpler life and was enticed by Hari’s manifesto. He and his family joined Hari in Mexico in 2013. They stayed only 12 days, after discovering that Hari had embellished his descriptions of the farm.

“Every promise was broken,” the man said. “The ranch was in disrepair. It was a mess. When we left, it was pretty much just him.”

Hari gave the man a hard time for leaving, saying that he was not living up to his obligations to the nascent community. But a short while later, Hari himself abandoned Fountain Creek and returned with Morris to Illinois. He and the man who had left kept in touch. After Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, the man said that Hari’s views grew increasingly radical. Hari’s fervent support for Trump also put him at odds with his church, which advocated for political neutrality.

“People like Michael Hari, they’re not so big on ideology as much as they are on the feeling of rightness,” the man said. “In his mind, Mike could be right about being a pacifist and he could also feel like he’s right about blowing up a mosque. People like you and me, it never runs through our mind — blow up a mosque. It’s extremism. Whatever Mike did, it had to be extreme. He was always in rebellion. If you go back to 2016, think about where he was in life. His farm idea had failed; he had taken a shot to his pride there. And then here comes Donald Trump telling everyone, ‘Let’s make America great again.’ To Michael Hari, Trump was a righteous cause.”

Michael Hari started a company called Crisis Resolution Security Services to apply as a contractor to build President Donald Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the video Hari produced as part of his application to the Department of Homeland Security.

“Build the Wall”

Hari didn’t just back Trump’s policies; he also wanted to help bring them to fruition. Back in Illinois after the failure of Fountain Creek, he leased a rundown former grain elevator on Main Street in Clarence, a short distance from his home off a narrow, poorly paved road. He used the building as an office and let Morris live there. Together, they formed the nucleus of the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia.

The goal of Hari’s organization was to return the United States to “the good old days” through bombings and armed resistance, according to a 38-page document he began selling on Amazon in 2017 called “The White Rabbit Handbook.” The book and YouTube videos Hari posted describe his group’s militancy as a response to corruption in Illinois state government and a means of supporting Trump’s secret battle to remove bad actors from the so-called deep state.

“Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions.”

“If you’re dissatisfied with how things are going in this country, you’re already a White Rabbit,” Hari said in a video he posted online in March 2018. “You’re in pretty good company, because about 60 to 70 percent of the people right now in this country think it’s on the wrong track. Whether you love Trump or whether you hate him, you’re probably dissatisfied with how things are going because, you know, Trump’s not really in charge of the whole government. You’ve got a huge deep state rebellion going there.”

Hari and his followers were part a small but growing cohort of extremists who appear to have been inspired by Trump’s rhetoric or conspiracy theories that promote the president as a sort of citizens’ defender against evil forces.

Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Eugene Stein conspired in October 2016 to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, where many Muslims, mostly of Somali descent, lived. The FBI became aware of the plot when a fourth man who was in the group reported it to law enforcement. In recorded conversations, the men referred to Muslims as “cockroaches,” and Stein, who was an early Trump supporter, commented: “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.” Lawyers for the three men blamed Trump’s rhetoric for encouraging the violent plot. A lawyer for Stein wrote in a court filing that Trump appealed to Stein as “the voice of a lost and ignored white, working-class set of voters” and that “Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions.”

Taylor Michael Wilson was among the white supremacist demonstrators at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 — demonstrators who, according to Trump, included some “very fine people.” Two months later, Wilson tried to pull the emergency brake on an Amtrak passenger train traveling through Nebraska. Armed with a handgun and carrying business cards for the white supremacist National Socialist Movement and the Covenant Nation Church, a Christian identity organization, Wilson told police he planned to kill the train’s black passengers. He was instead tackled by two conductors.

Left/top: The apartment complex targeted in Garden City, Kan. Right/bottom: FBI Special Agent in Charge Eric Jackson talks about the FBI's role in stopping a bomb plot. Photos: Orlin Wagner/AP; Bo Rader/The Wichita Eagle via AP

In July 2018, an unemployed Marine veteran named Matthew P. Wright blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam using an armored vehicle. Wright was armed with an AR-15 rifle, a handgun, and a flashbang device, which can temporarily stun people by generating a blinding flash. In letters he wrote to Trump and other elected officials, Wright referred to “QAnon,” a conspiracy theory that suggested that Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller were secretly working together to expose a sex-trafficking ring operated by Hillary Clinton and Hollywood celebrities.

QAnon began in October 2017, when an anonymous poster, using the handle Q, claimed on the internet forum 4chan to have information about Trump’s battle with the “deep state.” Online conspiracy theorists quickly began to parse and interpret Q’s cryptic posts, referring to them as “bread crumbs” that they believed could lead to some larger truth. Last summer, people began to show up at Trump rallies in QAnon T-shirts and holding up signs declaring: “We Are Q.” Despite the fact that many of Q’s prophecies have proven false — these bogus claims are catalogued on Reddit under the tag “Q’s Failures,” which include predicting that Republicans would win the 2018 midterms, that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not be fired or asked to resign, and that Clinton would be arrested — QAnon and related conspiracy theories have resonated among some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, including Hari and his followers.

More recently, Cesar Sayoc, a strip club disc jockey in Florida, allegedly mailed pipe bombs to more than a dozen Democratic Party leaders and critics of Trump. The windows of Sayoc’s white van were covered in pro-Trump stickers and images of target symbols over the faces of filmmaker Michael Moore, Clinton, and CNN commentator Van Jones.

Following Sayoc’s attempted bombings, Robert Bowers killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history. Bowers said he was inspired not only by his hatred of Jews, but also by the Jewish community’s support for immigrants, whom he called “invaders.” Trump has also demonized immigrants since he announced his candidacy in 2015.

Back in Clarence after leaving Fountain Creek, Hari worked as a food inspector for farms operated by Amish, Mennonites, and members of other Anabaptist communities. Those farmers bristled at the prospect of women inspectors from outside their conservative communities visiting their farms. Hari’s business filled that niche.

In December 2016, a month after Trump was elected, Hari founded a second company, CRSS, or Crisis Resolution Security Service. The company’s logo is a muscled man giving a thumbs-up, with a helicopter, tank, and raft of soldiers behind him. “We’ve got your back!” the slogan reads. On behalf of CRSS, Hari submitted a proposal to the Department of Homeland Security to build a 1,500-mile border wall for $10.9 billion.

Hari’s proposal for what he dubbed the Great Western IBW, or International Border Wall, envisioned a barrier topped with a pedestrian walkway similar to the one atop the Great Wall of China and visitor stations in Texas and California. “The wall exists to protect the economic rights of the U.S. population and to protect our way of life from other people who have different value systems,” a narrator reads over a video proposal Hari created.

Hari’s bid caught the attention of the Chicago Tribune, which questioned his lack of experience in construction projects, particularly building security barriers. “I have had some experience with it, but not a great deal,” Hari told the newspaper in April 2017. But Hari’s ability to complete such a project, if selected, was highly questionable even if he’d had construction experience. He told a local court in 2017 that he had just $17 in his bank account.

The Attacks Begin

Hari’s turn from extremist ideas to violent acts came on July 7, 2017. That day, aggravated by Hari’s emaciated dogs rooting through their trash, Hari’s neighbors Jon and Hope O’Neill walked over to his property to complain. They pushed open his gate and walked around the outside of his home. Hari then pulled up in his car.

“You are on my property,” Hope O’Neill remembered Hari telling them.

“We thought you were home,” she replied. “We were looking for you.”

That’s when, according to Hope O’Neill, Hari accused them of stealing from him. She and her husband laughed, then started to walk back to their home. “I got something for you,” Hari said, according to Hope O’Neill.

Hari then pulled out a gun and placed the mouth of the barrel to the back of Jon O’Neill’s head. Hope screamed, then called the police. Hope told The Intercept that she is confident the gun Hari had was real, but by the time police arrived, he was holding an air pistol, the kind that fires pellets. While not as dangerous as a real gun, air pistols can be fatal at point-blank range. The local police arrested Hari and charged him with felony unlawful restraint and misdemeanor battery.

Then came the two bombings, nearly back to back: in August 2017 at the mosque in Minnesota and then in November 2017 at a women’s clinic in Champaign, Illinois, where a secretary discovered a broken window and a device in a surgical room that appeared to be a live explosive. Investigators believe the bomb was designed to ignite oxygen tanks in the surgical room.

At first, the police and the FBI didn’t have credible leads for the bombings. That changed the day after Christmas in 2017.

Hari’s brother, Jason, an Iraq War veteran, had been in a nearly two-year feud with Hari. Jason was angry that Hari had damaged one of his trailers, while Hari had accused Jason of taking a security camera from his property and erasing photos from the camera’s memory.

Because Hari did not have electricity or running water, he often stayed at his parents’ house. While Jason was there one day, he found guns and bomb-making materials that Hari had left. Jason photographed the cache and showed the images to deputies at the same local sheriff’s office where Hari had once worked. The sheriff’s deputies referred Jason to the FBI, where he signed on as an informant.

Left/Top: Michael Hari rented an old grain elevator building and converted it into an office in Clarence, Ill. Right/Bottom: Signs for Hari's companies still hang from the building. Photos: Teresa Crawford/AP; Trevor Aaronson/The Intercept

With its first solid lead, the FBI recruited another informant, this one a member of Hari’s group, the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia. The informant had convictions for drug possession in the 1990s and a pending assault charge, according to FBI records, which did not disclose his name. The informant told federal agents that Hari, McWhorter, and Morris were responsible for the mosque and women’s clinic bombings.

Unaware that he was the target of an expanding FBI investigation, Hari was concerned about the state charges he faced for putting a gun to his neighbor’s head. On February 19, someone using a proxy server sent an anonymous tip to the ATF that Jon O’Neill was a “possible terrorism threat” who had bombs in his shed. Jon and Hope O’Neill cooperated with investigators, who found explosives just where the anonymous tipster had promised they would. The O’Neills told the ATF that they suspected Hari had planted the bombs.

One of the explosives was wired to a green propane tank. Jason Hari told the FBI that his brother had multiple green propane tanks that he used for camping. Shown a picture of the bomb and the tank, Jason Hari said the tank looked “very similar” to the ones Hari had.

The next day, the FBI informant inside Hari’s group wore a wire and recorded a conversation with Hari, Morris, and McWhorter. The informant said he thought Morris should be more careful when talking and not use the term “bang bangs,” an apparent reference to the bombs. Hari agreed, but said he wasn’t concerned because they’d moved all of the weapons and explosives out of the old grain elevator building he’d converted into an office. Besides, he told the informant, Morris had been “in a friendly crowd” when he made the comments.

The FBI and local police went door to door trying to find out who might have been responsible for the bombs in the O’Neills’ shed. They stopped at the home of McWhorter’s brother, who gave police permission to search his house. They found rifles McWhorter had left there; they had been illegally modified to make them capable of automatic fire. McWhorter was later arrested for federal firearms violations.

As the FBI searched the tiny town of Clarence, Hari, Morris, and Mack huddled in the former grain elevator that Hari used as an office and recorded an internet video. Hari, wearing a black ski mask, stared into the camera.

After FBI agents arrived in Clarence, Illinois, Michael Hari posted a series of videos to YouTube calling for militia members to help defend his group.

“We’re speaking to you from the Clarence, Illinois, area, where we’ve had a crisis in the last something over a week,” Hari said. He described a “bomb scare” in town and claimed FBI agents were searching homes without warrants.

“We’re asking for militia support to come and help us. … All of our liberties are on the line,” Hari continued. “If they can come into a town like ours and just rule it like they have, then they can do this anywhere. So we’re sending an appeal to all the militia brothers out there. Please come and support us in Clarence, Illinois. We need people to stand with us and win back our liberty, because it’s definitely gone. If this sort of thing can happen in Clarence, Illinois, it can happen anywhere. It can happen to you. It can happen to your family. We need you to come and stand with us.”

Morris and Mack, also wearing ski masks, took turns sitting in front of the computer’s video camera to ask for backup. “Sending out a request for more militia to come and help us take our town back,” Morris said in the video. “A lot of us have friends and family that we can no longer see now.”

A few days later, the FBI arrested Hari on the steps of the local courthouse, where he was scheduled to attend a hearing on the unlawful restraint and battery charges. He now faces separate federal trials in Minnesota for the mosque bombing, which is scheduled to begin September 30, and in Illinois for the women’s clinic bombing, which has not yet been scheduled. As is common for domestic extremists who use bombs, Hari and his followers weren’t charged with a terrorism-related offense, such as material support or weapons of mass destruction. Instead, federal prosecutors in Illinois charged Hari and his group with firearms violations, conspiracy, and attempted arsons, while prosecutors in Minnesota filed explosives charges.

McWhorter and Morris pleaded guilty in Minnesota to bombing the mosque there and the attempted bombing of the women’s clinic in Illinois. They also pleaded guilty to an Illinois charge alleging they conspired to commit robbery to raise money for Hari’s group. McWhorter’s stepson, Mack, who was not charged in the Minnesota mosque bombing, pleaded guilty in Illinois to firearms violations and the robbery conspiracy.

McWhorter has been cooperating with the FBI. He told agents that Hari spoke of reporting to “higher-ups” named “Ben Lewis” and “Congo Joe.” It’s unclear if these people exist.

In a letter from jail, Hari told The Intercept that he couldn’t comment on his case due to “legal circumstances.” However, he enclosed a poem he’d written titled, “We Are Men! The Battle Cry of the Patriot Freedom Fighters!”

It begins:

Men built the walls,
And men can destroy them.

We are men!

Men took away our rights
To defend ourselves,
To innocence, until proven guilty,
To make our choices, and to live our lives.
But men can win them back.

We are men!

Men built this unjust system,
And men can destroy it.

We are men!

The post Donald Trump Helped Turn a Christian Extremist Into an Alleged Domestic Terrorist appeared first on The Intercept.

“Our streets!” the protesters chanted in response to the white supremacists. “Our streets!”

When some protesters realized the gray car wasn’t stopping, they screamed. Then came the scrapes and thuds and finally a crash as Fields barreled into the crowd, sending people into the air and diving for safety, before the Dodge slammed into the back of another car.

“Holy shit!” one of the protesters said. “That Nazi just drove into people. Oh my God! We need paramedics right now!”

Fields then shifted the car into reverse and backed out toward the main road, the front bumper scraping the pavement and the engine squealing.

Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Charlottesville resident, was killed in the attack. At least 19 others were hurt.

Fields, a 20-year-old from Ohio who had been open about his racist views since high school, had marched in Virginia with the white supremacist group Vanguard America. He was charged in Virginia state court with murder and in federal court with hate crimes. He was not charged as a terrorist, despite then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions having initially described the Charlottesville attack as meeting “the definition of domestic terrorism.”

In announcing Fields’s federal indictment 10 months later, however, Sessions avoided using the word “terrorism” altogether, saying instead that the Justice Department remains “resolute that hateful ideologies will not have the last word and that their adherents will not get away with violent crimes against those they target.”

An Intercept analysis of federal prosecutions since 9/11 found that the Justice Department has routinely declined to bring terrorism charges against right-wing extremists even when their alleged crimes meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism: ideologically motivated acts that are harmful to human life and intended to intimidate civilians, influence policy, or change government conduct.

If Fields had been a Muslim aligned with an international terrorist group, the Justice Department almost certainly would have handled his case differently. According to The Intercept’s review, 268 right-wing extremists prosecuted in federal court since 9/11 were allegedly involved in crimes that appear to meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism. Yet the Justice Department applied anti-terrorism laws against only 34 of them, compared to more than 500 alleged international terrorists.

The FBI has acknowledged that federal prosecutors charge many violent domestic extremists with crimes other than terrorism, saying that simpler charges are often more effective in such cases. But the consequences of treating domestic and international terrorism differently are broad and deep. Terrorism charges carry stiffer penalties and often serve as an official statement about the severity of the offense.

“Terrorism is considered the most important kind of crime,” said Jesse Norris, a criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia. “It’s not a crime against some; it’s a crime against all. When you put people and crimes in that category, it places more importance on them. People take these crimes more seriously. That’s why it’s a problem that we have this double standard in classifying international terrorism violence as terrorism and domestic terrorism violence as not terrorism.”

Take the case of Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant, who drove a rented Home Depot truck through a bike lane in Lower Manhattan nearly three months after the Charlottesville attack, killing eight people. Saipov, who was injured in the assault, was so proud of his militant allegiances that he asked federal agents if he could display the Islamic State’s black flag in his hospital room.

Saipov’s crime was almost identical to Fields’s, but Sessions called his attack “a calculated act of terrorism in the heart of one of our great cities.” He was charged in federal court with murder and providing material support to ISIS.

Both Saipov and Fields grabbed the nation’s attention. Both were extremists who allegedly turned vehicles into deadly weapons. But because one was motivated by a foreign extremist ideology and the other by a domestic one, federal prosecutors treated one as a terrorist and the other as a crazy white guy filled with rage.

Left/Top: Police investigate a damaged Home Depot truck in New York on Nov. 1, 2017. Right/Bottom: A photo of Sayfullo Saipov is displayed at a news conference in New York on Nov. 1, 2017. Photos: Andres Kudacki/AP, Craig Ruttle/AP

As a string of deadly attacks and plots by alleged domestic terrorists have made headlines in recent months, there is some evidence that federal prosecutors and law enforcement may be changing their approach. Officials have repeatedly used the term “domestic terrorist” to describe Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist arrested last month for allegedly plotting to kill politicians and journalists, though they have yet to charge him with a terrorism offense. And current and former Justice Department officials have begun talking more openly about domestic terrorism as a pressing concern.

Nevertheless, a significant disparity remains in how these two types of ideologically motivated violence are handled, one rooted in the highly politicized way that U.S. laws and Justice Department officials define acts of terrorism. Terrorism has always been a political construct — there’s even a cliché for this — but its legal definition in the United States dates back only to 1986, when the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act made terrorist attacks against U.S. diplomats or citizens traveling abroad a crime.

In the 1990s, the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act made acts of terrorism committed within the United States, including those inspired by domestic ideologies, federal offenses. Before these laws, there was no crime of terrorism under the U.S. penal code, and it was only after the 9/11 attacks that anti-terrorism laws came to be widely used in federal criminal prosecutions. Such laws have raised critical questions among legal scholars and civil libertarians about whether the inherent difficulty in defining terrorism essentially guarantees prosecutorial abuse.

Domestic terrorism suspects enjoy basic legal protections denied to those accused of ties to international terrorism.

The U.S. State Department provides a broad framework — and the political cover that goes with it — for federal prosecutors to bring charges against alleged international terrorists. In those cases, charging someone with terrorism is relatively simple. The State Department administers a list of designated foreign terrorist organizations; anyone caught supporting one of these groups can be charged with terrorism-related crimes.

Domestic terrorism suspects enjoy basic legal protections denied to those accused of ties to international terrorism. Because of First Amendment concerns that a list of domestic terrorist groups would unconstitutionally criminalize unpopular ideas and ideologies, there is no such list, making the abusive types of prosecutions used to target alleged international terrorists more difficult to pursue against domestic actors. But prosecutors still have plenty of legal tools at their disposal to go after alleged domestic extremists.

Among them is an expansive law against providing material support to terrorists, which has two provisions. One outlaws nearly any kind of support to organizations on the list of State Department-designated foreign terrorist groups, and has been widely and controversially used by prosecutors to tar even nonviolent political or charitable activity with the international terrorism brush.

“The material support regime as a general matter is extremely broad, and we have concerns about its overbreadth and vagueness,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “A disturbingly high number of material support prosecutions, including abusive sting operations, are against people who don’t actually have a tie to a terrorist or extremist group or haven’t actually committed a violent act or even attempted to commit a violent act.”

But the other provision of the material support law allows the Justice Department to prosecute suspects for their role in supporting about 50 proscribed offenses, including bombing government buildings, murdering government employees, using weapons of mass destruction, and hostage taking. The material support law does have some practical limitations concerning domestic extremists. Attacks not involving a bomb or radiological device — such as Dylann Roof’s mass shooting in South Carolina or Fields’s car attack in Virginia — require the killing or attempted killing of a U.S. government employee or the destruction of U.S. government property for the material support law to be applicable. There are no such legal requirements under material support when the attacker is affiliated with or inspired by an international terrorist organization.

Terrorism by the Numbers

Hundreds of prosecutions of Muslims on terrorism charges in the wake of the 9/11 attacks have created the perception that international terrorism is a significantly graver and more persistent threat in the United States than right-wing domestic extremism. But whether one is more serious than the other is the subject of ongoing debate. Some studies by academics, think tanks, civil rights groups, and news organizations have suggested that right-wing terrorism poses the greater threat. A 2017 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office on terrorist violence from September 12, 2001 through December 31, 2016 found that while slightly more people have been killed by Muslim extremists than by their right-wing counterparts, right-wing extremists were responsible for three times as many violent acts. Research by the Anti-Defamation League on 573 “extremist-related fatalities” from 2002 to 2018 found that 80 percent of the victims were killed by right-wing extremists.

“It all depends on how you count,” Norris said.

But one thing is clear: By almost exclusively charging international extremists as terrorists, the Justice Department inflates the perceived threat of those actors, compared to those with right-wing domestic ideologies. The press has reinforced this notion; a recent University of Alabama study found that terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists receive 357 percent more media coverage than attacks committed by non-Muslims.

The double standard has had powerful consequences for how the FBI allocates counterterrorism resources, leading invariably to international threats being prioritized over domestic ones.

This double standard has had powerful consequences for how the FBI and other law enforcement agencies allocate counterterrorism resources, leading invariably to international threats being prioritized over domestic ones. While no public government report quantifies the number of domestic extremists arrested by federal, state, and local authorities, Justice Department officials have fastidiously maintained a list of international terrorism prosecutions since 9/11. That list has been released periodically, in 2010, 2014, and 2015, and the data is often used to bolster political initiatives, as happened last year when the Trump administration apparently manipulated it in an attempt to justify its so-called Muslim ban.

So who are the right-wing domestic terrorists in the United States? The current system has left that to individual federal prosecutors to decide. After a Donald Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to Democratic Party leaders and critics of the president in October, and in the wake of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, these charging decisions seem more critical than ever.

“We clearly have domestic terrorist groups in the United States. We just don’t call them terrorist groups,” said Brendan R. McGuire, a former prosecutor who served as the terrorism chief for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. “Generally speaking, there continue to be challenges within the government to applying the terrorism label to purely domestic conduct. We’re just much more experienced and comfortable with exporting that label, with seeing terrorism as something that comes only from the outside.”

Vague Guidelines, Underused Laws

What makes a white supremacist’s attack on a group of minorities terrorism, rather than, say, a hate crime? When an anti-abortion zealot plants a bomb at a women’s clinic, should he be charged with using weapons of mass destruction or with a lesser explosives charge?

Terrorism is subjective. In the eyes of federal prosecutors, an American-born ISIS sympathizer who has never met another ISIS supporter, for example, is a terrorist as long as he commits an act of violence and credits the terrorist organization. A white supremacist who consorts with other white supremacists and bombs a mosque could be a terrorist, but more often is only charged with possessing and using explosives. That accusation may describe the facts of the alleged crime, but it doesn’t instantly conjure the sense of collective peril implied by a charge of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction.

“Like so much of the counterterrorism discourse, it’s based on these feelings that we have about how things happen, rather than data,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “Back in the ’90s, terrorism was usually used as a rhetorical device. If I wanted to say this kind of violence was extremely bad, I’d say it’s terrorism. But it had no meaning in the courtroom, where we’re charging murder or conspiracy or whatever we’re charging. By bringing a pejorative term like ‘terrorism’ into the court, you’re politicizing the prosecution.”

“By bringing a pejorative term like ‘terrorism’ into the court, you’re politicizing the prosecution.”

Internal Justice Department guidelines are so vague that prosecutors often come up with their own criteria to determine whether to file a terrorism-related charge in domestic extremism cases, former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. said. While Hockeimer was at the Justice Department, he and his colleagues developed their own set of rules to determine when to charge a suspect with a terrorism offense, basing decisions in part on who and how many people were targeted in an attack, even though the law doesn’t contain specific references to either. “You have to ask yourself: Is the attack aimed at causing a high-volume loss of life? Or is it targeting a particular area in order to kill one or two people?” Hockeimer said. “You have to look at what the ultimate result of it was.”

FBI and Justice Department officials have used the recent resurgence of far-right extremism to make the case for a new domestic terrorism law, in an echo of what occurred after the 9/11 attacks, when members of Congress demanded new laws to combat Al Qaeda and approved the Patriot Act, which created and expanded a host of anti-terrorism laws and government surveillance powers. But is an aggressive new law needed, when prosecutors already have powerful and controversial anti-terrorism laws at their disposal – laws that they have only rarely chosen to use against right-wing extremists?

Among the relatively few right-wing defendants to face weapons of mass destruction charges since 9/11 was anti-government extremist Jerry Drake Varnell. An FBI agent posing as a fellow anti-government extremist provided Varnell with a van loaded with a fake bomb. Varnell then tried to detonate the bomb next to a bank in Oklahoma City. He was charged with and convicted of several offenses, including attempting to use weapons of mass destruction — a charge that is almost universally applied to Muslims caught in counterterrorism stings similar to his.

But Varnell is one of only 24 right-wing extremists since 9/11 to face a weapons of mass destruction charge. Prosecutors more often bring less serious charges against violent right-wing actors like Thaddeus Cheyenne Murphy, who bombed an NAACP office in Colorado and was charged with firearms violations and being a felon in possession of firearms, or, more recently, Paul M. Rosenfeld, who was convicted of an explosives charge for plotting to detonate a homemade bomb on the National Mall on Election Day 2018 to raise awareness about “sortition,” a political theory that advocates the random selection of government officials over their election.

Brzozowski has been joined by a chorus of current and former Justice Department and FBI officials. Last month, Thomas T. Cullen, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia who is prosecuting Fields, the Charlottesville attacker, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for a domestic terrorism law. In 2017, Thomas F. O’Connor, a counterterrorism agent in Washington, D.C., who is also the president of the FBI Agents Association, the union that represents the bureau’s more than 13,000 agents, made a similar case in The Hill. Because there are no penalties attached to the legal definition of domestic terrorism, O’Connor reasoned, “‘domestic terrorism’ is not a crime in and of itself under federal law.”

“The answer is that a new law is not necessary to take on the scourge of white supremacist violence. The government already has the tools necessary to take on this threat.”

But Cullen’s and O’Connor’s arguments are flawed. The crime of “international terrorism” doesn’t exist either, yet hundreds of people with alleged links to foreign groups have been charged under anti-terrorism laws. In addition to material support — which the Patriot Act expanded and for which it increased the maximum punishment from 10 years to 15 years, or life in prison if the crime results in death — statutes available to prosecute domestic and international terrorists include a law that prohibits the use of “weapons of mass destruction” — including everything from a nuclear weapon to a pressure-cooker explosive or a pipe bomb — and another that defines attacks on mass transit systems as terrorism.

Even when prosecutors decline to charge defendants with terrorism-related offenses, they have an opportunity to ask for a so-called terrorism adjustment at sentencing that results in longer prison terms if a judge agrees that the crime meets the definition of domestic terrorism. But prosecutors have only asked for such enhancements in a handful of right-wing cases, according to The Intercept’s analysis. One was the case of Wayde Lynn Kurt, a white supremacist in Washington state who was convicted by a jury in 2011 of firearms violations. Recordings he had made indicated that he was planning a terrorist attack called the “final solution,” which included a plot to kill then-President Barack Obama.

“It’s important to emphasize that whenever you see a terrorism-related legislative proposal, you have to ask, ‘Is it necessary? How will it be used against the very minority groups that we need and want to protect and who have historically and wrongly been FBI targets and still largely are?’” said Shamsi of the ACLU. “The answer is that a new law is not necessary to take on the scourge of white supremacist violence. The government already has the tools necessary to take on this threat.”

Since stepping down shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Mary B. McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, has been making a public argument similar to those of Brzozowski, Cullen, and O’Connor. McCord has written that while state and federal laws can provide significant punishment for domestic terrorists — including life sentences and the death penalty — “they fail to equate it under federal law, as it deserves to be equated, with the actions of ISIS-inspired terrorists who engage in violence in pursuit of their equally insidious goals.”

Asked why she supports the creation of a new domestic terrorism law when prosecutors could use laws already on the books, such as the one that prohibits providing material support to terrorists, McCord, who as head of the National Security Division was responsible for authorizing terrorism charges nationwide, told The Intercept during a phone interview that the material support law requires “an international component.”

In fact, the material support provision that is focused on terrorists generally, and includes the approximately 50 proscribed offenses, has been used against domestic extremists — but only three times. In the only such case since 9/11, Eric J. Feight, a New York man, was charged with and convicted of material support for helping a white supremacist build a radiological “death ray” for use against Muslims.

The material support charge against Feight was approved when McCord was second-in-command at the National Security Division. When asked about it, she said the case “was tied to international terrorism.” Told that this was untrue, McCord asked for 15 minutes to review Feight’s prosecution, then called back to acknowledge that she had been mistaken. In hindsight, she said, maybe the Justice Department could use the material support law more aggressively against domestic extremists. “Certainly, if I were still at the Department of Justice, and I saw a person who was contributing material support to one of these enumerated offenses, I would definitely approve charging that,” McCord said, “including in situations that have no nexus to international terrorism.”

Although a small case history exists of prosecuting domestic extremists under material support and other anti-terrorism laws, officials at the Justice Department wring their hands over whether to use such laws in cases of domestic terrorism and generally avoid public discussions about the use of anti-terrorism laws against domestic extremists, more than a dozen current and former prosecutors told The Intercept. Instead, they suggest that new and even more powerful laws are needed to pursue right-wing extremists.

A Lack of Transparency

The U.S. government does not track acts of domestic terrorism or related federal prosecutions in any systematic way, leaving the Justice Department with few tools to determine whether domestic extremist threats are on the rise at a time when white supremacists have been emboldened by Trump’s nationalistic, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last October that “domestic extremist movements collectively pose a steady threat of violence and economic harm to the United States.” A year earlier, before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wray described the threat of domestic terrorism as “very, very serious” and “something that we spend a lot of our time focused on.” He has declined in congressional testimony to say how many agents are working on the problem but mentioned in 2017 that “about 1,000 open domestic terrorism investigations as we speak.” The FBI also declined requests from The Intercept to provide the number of agents assigned to such cases, stating, “While we cannot comment specifically on this breakdown, the FBI’s top priority remains protecting the United States from terrorist attacks — both international and domestic.”

Yet in fiscal year 2009, the most recent year for which such data has been made public, just 335 of the bureau’s more than 13,000 agents were assigned to domestic terrorism. By contrast, international terrorism is the FBI’s top priority, with thousands of agents devoted to it.

False Positives

One man’s nutjob can be a federal prosecutor’s domestic terrorist. The Justice Department’s internal case management system reveals how subjective, and sometimes ridiculous, it can be to try to define acts of terrorism.

Federal prosecutors nationwide use an internal system called the Legal Information Office Network System, or LIONS, which stores data about cases. The data is only released publicly in the aggregate, but as part of its review of federal prosecutions, The Intercept, working with another database maintained by federal court administrators, unmasked 752 cases that prosecutors have designated as involving an alleged domestic terrorist, accounting for approximately half the cases in LIONS that were coded as domestic terrorism.

The data suggests that, while the Justice Department follows a very narrow definition of domestic terrorism publicly and when bringing criminal charges, prosecutors take an expansive and at times comically inconsistent view of it internally, labeling hundreds of cases as involving domestic terrorism even when the facts do not support the designation.

While the Justice Department follows a very narrow definition of domestic terrorism publicly, prosecutors take an expansive and at times comically inconsistent view of it internally.

Of those cases, only 15 appeared to meet the federal statutory definition of domestic terrorism, which requires that violence be motivated by a domestic ideology. A handful of cases involved violent acts that may have met the definition of domestic terrorism, but nothing in the case files suggested an ideological motivation. Others related to international terrorism, involving defendants accused of supporting Hamas, the Colombian guerrilla group FARC, ISIS, and others.

But the vast majority — more than 700 cases — involved incidents that don’t appear to match the legal definition of terrorism at all, such as a Connecticut man making menacing phone calls and sending a threatening letter to ESPN sportscasters over a personal grievance. Prosecutors designated an Alabama man’s case as domestic terrorism after he fired rifle rounds into an energy facility, even though there was no indication that the shooting was ideologically motivated. In another case marked as domestic terrorism, a West Virginia man firebombed a mobile home using a Molotov cocktail in exchange for $400 and some Oxycontin.

The Growing Threat

The FBI logged 176 domestic terrorism arrests between September 2016 and September 2017, according to Wray’s 2017 Senate testimony. That number is significantly higher than media reports and Justice Department and local police announcements during that period suggest. When The Intercept asked under the Freedom of Information Act for any documents or communications to support Wray’s number, the FBI responded that it could find no records to support the director’s statement. Then, earlier this month, law enforcement sources provided “approximate” numbers to the Washington Post, suggesting that in 2017 and 2018, the FBI conducted more investigations of domestic terrorists than international ones. The claim appeared to signal a reversal of priorities at the FBI, but could not be vetted, as the source material for the number wasn’t provided to the Post.

It’s impossible to know from publicly available information and the leaked aggregate numbers that the Post reported how effective the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been at thwarting right-wing extremists before they transform their hate into violence. But what is clear is that a significant number of violent extremists are slipping through the FBI’s dragnet.

Among the domestic terrorists the FBI recently missed was a 56-year-old strip club DJ who wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and once posted a video selfie from a Trump rally in Florida. A prolific Twitter user, Cesar Sayoc posted far-right conspiracy theories and sent threatening messages to Trump’s opponents, including one to former Vice President Joe Biden with a photo of an alligator that had eaten a man.

The FBI was unaware of Sayoc until October 2018, when more than a dozen pipe bombs began to arrive at the homes and offices of Democratic Party leaders and Trump critics. Two of the bombs, one addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan and the other to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, were mailed to CNN. None detonated, though all contained explosive material and in some cases shards of glass to maximize injury. A fingerprint on an envelope matched one Sayoc had provided following an earlier arrest in Florida, where, over the previous two decades, he’d been charged with theft and threatening to bomb the local power company in an attack that he said would be “worse than September 11.”

But soon after prosecutors filed the indictment, amid unprecedented media coverage and public debate about the scourge of right-wing domestic terrorism, the Justice Department’s language began to change. In a filing supporting Sayoc’s extradition from Florida to New York, where he faces criminal charges, federal prosecutors described his offenses as “a domestic terrorist attack targeting at least 15 victims” waged as part of a “terror campaign.”

On November 9, 2018, two weeks after Sayoc’s arrest and three days after an election gave Democrats, including some Sayoc had targeted, a majority in the House of Representatives, federal prosecutors in New York issued a new indictment, filing 30 charges against Sayoc, including five that alleged he used weapons of mass destruction — an anti-terrorism charge that has been applied against 79 international terrorists since 9/11 but just 23 other right-wing extremists during the same time period.

Sayoc pleaded guilty on Thursday to 65 charges, including 35 newly filed counts. He faces the possibility of life in prison — a harsh sentence that sends a message about how seriously our society takes the crime he committed. What’s unusual is that this standard is being applied to someone who can’t be cast as an agent of an international terrorist group.

So far, that isn’t the case for Hasson, the Coast Guard lieutenant living in Maryland who put together a cache of firearms and steroids and a target list of journalists and prominent Democrats. A self-described white nationalist, Hasson allegedly plotted an attack that he hoped would spark a race war.

“The defendant is a domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct,” federal prosecutors wrote in a court filing last month.

Although those prosecutors announced after Hasson’s arrest that they were considering the addition of terrorism-related charges, they haven’t filed any. Hasson faces charges of firearms and drug violations.

He’s like many right-wing extremists in the United States: labeled a terrorist, but not prosecuted as one.

The post Violent Far-Right Extremists Are Rarely Prosecuted as Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

But beneath Crawford’s vanilla exterior lurked a white supremacist angry about President Barack Obama’s election and contemptuous of upstate New York’s sizable Muslim community. And he had ambitious plans to transform his hatred into violence.

He wanted to build a “death ray,” a portable, remote-controlled radiological weapon made from medical equipment and off-the-shelf electronics. He’d load the weapon into a van with tinted windows, drive it to a nearby mosque, scurry away to a safe distance, and switch it on remotely using a smartphone. Anyone in its path would be radiated and left to die a slow, mysterious death. He even had a pithy nickname for his weapon: “Hiroshima on a light switch.”

Crawford’s killing machine was never built. He was convicted at trial in August 2015 of attempting to use a radiological dispersal device and a weapon of mass destruction. He is serving 30 years in prison.

His case is remarkable not so much for its absurdity — federal agents admitted that his imagined weapon was likely impossible to make — but for how prosecutors handled it. Crawford’s co-defendant, an engineer named Eric J. Feight who had agreed to build the weapon’s remote control, pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism — the first and only time federal prosecutors have used the material support law against a domestic extremist since 9/11, according to a review of federal prosecutions by The Intercept.

The material support law is prosecutors’ tool of choice for hauling international terrorists into federal court — more than 400 international terrorism defendants have faced material support charges since 9/11. But the Justice Department has been reluctant to use this expansive and powerful law, which allows defendants to be prosecuted for providing minimal, and at times, inconsequential, support to a violent plot, against domestic terrorists.

The rarity of such charges has helped drive a false narrative that domestic terrorism is not punishable under existing anti-terrorism laws. “Why is there no criminal statute for domestic terrorism?” CBS News asked in October 2017. “Americans Are Surprised Domestic Terrorism Isn’t A Federal Crime,” HuffPost declared last April.

In fact, the government has ample room to go after domestic terrorism under existing laws. The material support law has two parts. The first can be applied to anyone who commits or assists with a terrorist attack, including one rooted in a domestic ideology, so long as the crime involves one of about 50 proscribed offenses, including bombing government buildings, murdering government employees, using weapons of mass destruction, and hostage taking. The second and more controversial allows the Justice Department to prosecute anyone supporting or working with a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization, however minor their role in an attack or plot, including even unwitting targets of FBI undercover stings who never were in contact with actual terrorists. Civil libertarians have for two decades criticized the material support law, but primarily for the abuses possible in the more expansive provision for international terrorists. The more limited provision for domestic terrorism is harder for prosecutors to abuse.

Although the part of the material support law that can be used against domestic extremists is limited in some important ways — mass shootings not involving the death of government employees are notably absent from the list of offenses eligible for material support charges — Feight’s conviction in the “death ray” plot shows that domestic extremists can in many cases be prosecuted using the same aggressive laws that federal prosecutors wield against international terrorists. But the Justice Department has been reluctant to use that authority against white supremacists and followers of other domestic ideologies.

This double standard has little to do with existing laws. Instead, it is a result of decisions within the Justice Department, which since 9/11 has prioritized international terrorism prosecutions at the expense of domestic ones.

“After 9/11, the FBI’s and the Justice Department’s resources were directed to international terrorism. The prosecutions against domestic terrorists suffered,” said Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., a former federal prosecutor who served on the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Task Force in the 1990s. “I follow the domestic terrorism cases, and I sometimes wonder why prosecutors aren’t going after more significant statutes with these guys, using the anti-terrorism laws. On one hand, I suspect the average person thinks of terrorism in the international sense, and to some degree, the Justice Department has come to think of terrorism in that way as well.”

A Domestic Anti-Terrorism Law

Among the first known instances of the material support law being used against domestic extremists came in 1996, when federal prosecutors charged seven men with assembling explosives and plotting to blow up an FBI building. Prosecutors filed material support charges against two of the seven men, Floyd Raymond Looker and James R. Rogers. Looker, the leader of a group known as the West Virginia Mountaineer Militia, and Rogers, a lieutenant in a local fire department who provided blueprints of the FBI building, pleaded guilty.

Five years later, in February 2001, federal prosecutors brought material support charges against Connor Cash, an environmental activist accused of being a leader of the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that had claimed responsibility for arsons and vandalism throughout the United States. The Justice Department alleged that Cash had assisted in the arson of five homes under construction on Long Island, as well as an unsuccessful plot to burn down a duck farm and release the animals. A jury acquitted Cash of all counts in May 2004.

“I suspect the average person thinks of terrorism in the international sense, and to some degree, the Justice Department has come to think of terrorism in that way as well.”

After the 9/11 attacks, when federal prosecutors began to turn to the material support law as the statute of choice in prosecuting international terrorists, the Justice Department created the National Security Division, which absorbed the counterterrorism and counterespionage sections and created a powerful bureaucratic node responsible for national security prosecutions. Under a policy created at the time, and still in effect today, all terrorism-related charges — including material support and the use of weapons of mass destruction — must be approved by the National Security Division. After the policy took effect, the Justice Department’s tentative experiments with using the material support law against domestic terrorists hit a wall.

In the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department and the FBI reoriented to focus significant resources on international terrorism threats, with the prevention of another terrorist attack from Al Qaeda or other groups as the top priority for both agencies. White supremacists, right-wing extremists, and other domestic terrorists were not a pressing concern. “If you took yourself back to 2006, when the National Security Division was first started, the country was still in the throes of responses to 9/11,” said Mary B. McCord, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general for national security from 2016 to 2017 and a principal deputy assistant attorney general for its National Security Division from 2014 to 2016.

McCord and other former federal prosecutors maintain that the Justice Department has always taken domestic terrorism seriously. But in the years since 9/11, the difference between how domestic and international terrorists are prosecuted and punished has been striking.

The case of William “Bill” Keebler is an example. He came to the FBI’s attention after spending two weeks in Nevada during the 2014 armed standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters. Keebler helped organize Bundy’s supporters by posting on social media and YouTube under the handle “Th3Hunt3r.” After returning home to Utah, Keebler started organizing a militia of his own, recruiting like-minded people on Facebook and at local gun shows. “We are now being taken by a rogue government,” he wrote in a May 2014 Facebook post.

Keebler called his militia the Patriots Defense Force. FBI informants who joined the group told federal agents that members were preparing for future standoffs with the government, operations to rob drug dealers at the U.S.-Mexico border, and violent attacks targeting Muslims. The FBI then inserted two undercover agents into Keebler’s militia. One agent told Keebler that he had experience with explosives.

Because Keebler had tried to bomb a government building, the material support law could have applied. Instead, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge federal prosecutors had chosen.

By June 2016, the Patriots Defense Force had eight members, including two FBI undercover agents and a government informant. Members of the militia had talked about killing Muslims, and Keebler and the undercover agents drove to a mosque to consider it as a target. But Keebler was most interested in an attack on the Bureau of Land Management. He and one of the FBI agents concocted a plot to bomb a cabin in Utah used by the bureau. The FBI built the bomb, which was fake, and Keebler planted it in the cabin. The bomb simply fizzled, as designed, and in July 2016, Keebler was charged with attempting to damage federal property with an explosive device. Despite a federal prosecutor describing Keebler as a “would-be terrorist,” the militia leader did not face terrorism-related charges.

Because Keebler had tried to bomb a government building, the material support law could have applied and with it, a possible 15-year prison sentence. Instead, Keebler spent two years in prison while his case was pending, and after pleading guilty to the lesser charge federal prosecutors had chosen, he was sentenced to time served and three years of probation. Prosecutors did not ask for a “terrorism enhancement” at sentencing — a request that, if approved by the judge, could have resulted in a more significant sentence. Keebler, now on probation in Utah, declined to comment for this article.

By contrast, federal prosecutors charged Nicholas Young, a 36-year-old Muslim police officer in Washington, D.C., with material support when he sent a $245 gift card to a man he believed was with the Islamic State. The gift card recipient was in fact an FBI informant. Young was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Last month, an appeals court vacated his convictions on two charges of attempting to obstruct justice, but upheld his conviction for material support. Young will be re-sentenced soon, but his original 15-year term was in line with those of the more than 400 other Muslim terrorism defendants convicted of material support.

Current federal prosecutors, including Thomas E. Brzozowski, the Justice Department’s counsel for domestic terrorism, declined to comment for this article. In an interview with The Intercept, McCord said that in retrospect, she and other prosecutors had underutilized the material support law for prosecuting and punishing domestic terrorists.

“I’ve been a cheerleader for the fact that, hey, this is the same stuff — extremism is extremism,” McCord said. “The white supremacist extremism we’re seeing right now, they’ve taken the playbook from the foreign terrorist organizations in terms of who they’re trying to recruit and who can be easily drawn to feel like they’re working for something bigger than themselves. To me, the parallels are very close.”

Despite the material support law being used predominantly against Muslim extremists during her tenure at the Justice Department, McCord said religion was never a factor in charging decisions. “I think, frankly, because of 9/11 and Al Qaeda and ISIS and Islamic extremism, we have been overly focused on those threats,” McCord said. “But I would be a happy to call a domestic terrorist a domestic terrorist. I will shout it from the rooftops.”

The “Death Ray” Case

The only case in which federal prosecutors have brought material support charges against domestic terrorists since 9/11 began with a phone call.

Crawford, the New York man who tried to build a “death ray,” needed help financing the construction of his weapon. In July 2012, he called a Ku Klux Klan hotline in North Carolina operated by Chris Barker, an imperial wizard in a KKK group called Loyal White Knights. Crawford reportedly left a message saying that he had explosives that he wanted to detonate in New York or New Jersey.

Barker was facing state firearms charges in North Carolina. He and his lawyer took the voicemail to the FBI, offering up Crawford in exchange for leniency on the firearms charges. The FBI then enlisted Barker as an informant and set up an elaborate sting.

Barker invited Crawford to come to North Carolina to discuss his plans. In a hotel room, Crawford met with Barker, a heavyset man with a goatee and ears slightly too large for his head, and two FBI undercover agents. One agent was pretending to be a Klansman, while the other was posing as a wealthy, like-minded businessperson looking to finance an attack.

Crawford met with an FBI informant and undercover agents in a North Carolina hotel room, where he asked for money to help build a “death ray” to target Muslims in upstate New York. Video: FBI

“Now I don’t know how close you guys have been watching, but you might have noticed that for the last 20 years or so, and especially during this administration, all the fashionable ethnic groups really can do no wrong, OK?” Crawford said, according to video from an FBI camera that had been hidden in the hotel room. “You know, we got Black Panthers committing felonies. That don’t matter — Eric Holder’s not going to prosecute his people. Mexicans — illegal Mexicans get to come in and do whatever they want. They rape, maim, and pillage. They turn ’em loose. They got, like, Jessie Jackass and Al Charlatan kicking up the Justice for Trayvon mobs. And it never ends, OK? Hate crimes, OK? This is all — white Christians just need not apply. White Christians need not apply for law-abiding protection or anything like that. And then you’ve got CAIR, OK? The Council on American-Islamic Relations, OK? We can do no right. We’re convicted in the press before we do anything, OK?”

Crawford then described his plan to create a “death ray” to target Muslims. He said he already had an accomplice, Feight, whom he called his “software guy”; he just needed money.

“This could kill whole cities in a night, silently,” Crawford said of his proposed weapon.

“If you had it in the parking lot of, say, your local mosque, or just outside of it, and pointed in the given direction, you would be able to — it would reach from here to the mosque?” an undercover FBI agent asked.

“Easily,” Crawford said.

“Then what happens? You shut it off, that’s it? No more radiation?”

“Then you come and get the truck. You drive it up, you park it, you point it. You’d be totally anonymous. You’d be untraceable. It would be weeks before anyone had any inkling anything was wrong, and they’d probably drop dead in their beds.”

“It’s almost too good to be true,” one of the agents said.

“I think the potential is considerable,” Crawford added. “Just make sure you’re nowhere near this thing when it goes off, OK? Like curvature-of-the-earth distance, OK?”

“But if it’s working from a smartphone, I can call it from —” one of the agents said.

“Anywhere,” Crawford answered, finishing the sentence. “You could call it from home.”

The FBI agents agreed to support Crawford’s “death ray,” and in November 2012, they traveled to upstate New York to meet with him and his “software guy.” Feight, who had curly hair and a mustache, had worked as an engineer for more than two decades and was the father of three girls.

For their meeting, Crawford came up with code names. He was “Dmitri.” Feight was “Yoda.” The undercover agents were “Robin Hood” and “Daddy Warbucks.” The “death ray” was “the Baby.” They even had a code phrase for killing Muslims: “sterilizing medical waste.”

Because Feight was only building the remote control, the FBI undercover agents needed to be sure that he knew the remote was for a weapon. Using the code words, they questioned Feight about what exactly he was building. Feight wasn’t under any illusions. “I started seeing how things, the direction things were going and then certainly after the elections,” Feight told the agents, referring to Obama’s election in 2008. “It’s like, well, OK, you know [what] that old saying is, right? You know, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” He added a moment later: “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

Crawford and Feight began building their device. On the afternoon of June 18, 2013, in a warehouse the FBI had wired with cameras, one of the undercover agents watched as Crawford worked on the purported “death ray.” Wearing gloves and holding a screwdriver, Crawford leaned against the power supply, which was encased in a large, black metal box. “You’re actually transforming energy from electrical energy to ionizing radiation,” he explained to the agent.

Less than a minute later, an FBI SWAT team carrying assault rifles kicked in the door. “FBI! Get down! Get down!” they shouted. Crawford raised his hands in shock. An agent then forced Crawford onto his belly and handcuffed him.

FBI agents raided a warehouse, where they’d installed hidden cameras, as Crawford attempted to build his “death ray.” An undercover agent, whose face is blurred, talked to Crawford as he assembled the device. Video: FBI

Federal prosecutors first charged Crawford with providing material support, but later dropped that charge in favor of allegations that he’d conspired to use a radiological dispersal device and a weapon of mass destruction. Feight, who was arrested later, was charged with providing material support.

Crawford was convicted at trial and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Feight pleaded guilty and received a little more than eight years; he is due to be released next year.

On December 19, 2016, when Crawford was sentenced, McCord was the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the National Security Division. “Glendon Scott Crawford is an extremist who planned to use a radiological dispersal device to target unsuspecting Muslim Americans with lethal doses of radiation,” she said in a Justice Department statement at the time. “The National Security Division’s highest priority is counterterrorism, and we will continue to pursue justice against anyone who seeks to perpetrate attacks against Americans on our soil.”

Notably, as is still customary for Justice Department officials discussing domestic extremists, McCord did not label Crawford a terrorist. She missed an ideal opportunity to shout it from the rooftops.

Asked about this recently, McCord explained that she had probably been leery of using the word “terrorist” to avoid prejudicing a jury. It’s a concern that federal prosecutors never seem to show for international terrorism defendants.

“Glendon Scott Crawford is a domestic terrorist,” McCord said, “and I should have called him that.”

The post The Domestic Terrorism Law the Justice Department Forgot appeared first on The Intercept.

More than a decade earlier, police and FBI agents had arrested a dozen of Dibee’s associates in the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front within the span of a few months. They were charged with conspiring to burn down factories that slaughtered animals for meat, timber mills that disrupted sensitive ecosystems, government facilities that penned wild horses, and a ski resort perched on a pristine mountaintop. Dibee, a former Microsoft software tester known for his ingenuity, had slipped away in the midst of it all.

While the arsons, which never hurt or killed anyone, largely took place in the late 1990s, the wave of arrests known as the “Green Scare” came in the post-9/11 era, when terrorism was the FBI’s prevailing obsession. The fur and biomedical industries had spent years lobbying the Justice Department and lawmakers to go after eco-activists, who had damaged their property, held audacious demonstrations decrying their business activities, and cost them millions of dollars. When the planes hit the twin towers, industry groups seized on the opportunity to push legislation, and federal law enforcement ramped up pursuit of radical activists in the name of counterterrorism.

In 2009, when a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report raised alarms about the rising threat of right-wing extremist violence, it provoked a very different response. After outcry from conservative groups, DHS backtracked on the report and later disbanded the domestic terrorism unit that produced it.

Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terrorism analyst at DHS, says there’s a reason law enforcement took a less aggressive approach to right-wing white supremacists and anti-government attackers. In the case of the eco-extremists, the government had a powerful ally: industry. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying I wish you’d do something about these right-wing extremists,” said Johnson, who left his position in 2010, after his warnings about right-wing violence were dismissed. “If enough people lobbied congresspeople about white nationalists and how it’s affecting their business activity, then I’m sure you’ll get legislation.”

Now, in the wake of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer by white supremacist James Alex Fields, past and current Justice Department officials have argued that a new domestic terrorism statute is necessary to better respond to far-right violence.

But law enforcement and federal prosecutors already have powerful counterterrorism authorities at their disposal, and their history of using them to go after radical activists who committed property crimes suggests that any new crackdown is likely to sweep up far more than domestic extremists who pose a lethal threat.

No new law was required to treat eco-saboteurs as terrorists in the wake of 9/11. Of 70 federal prosecutions of radical environmentalists and animal rights activists identified by The Intercept, 52 did not result in charges under anti-terrorism laws. Yet the defendants were repeatedly called terrorists by the Justice Department in public statements and internal communications. The designation opened up additional resources and gave the government powerful leverage in the form of terrorism sentencing enhancements, which prosecutors sought in more than 20 cases.

Meanwhile, in the remaining 18 cases, prosecutors applied an anti-terrorism law written with the help of industry that was designed exclusively to target animal rights activists. Six cases involved activists releasing mink and vandalizing fur facilities, and six involved individuals accused of encouraging radical acts like sabotage but not participating in any themselves. Four of the cases involved activists protesting outside researchers’ homes and were dismissed because the allegations were too vague.

The story of how years of corporate lobbying ended with Dibee in cuffs contains lessons for those considering how to handle the surge in right-wing violence, as well as for a new generation of environmental activists again facing accusations of eco-terrorism.

Industry Intelligence-Gathering

Joe Dibee grew up camping in the spectacular forests, mountains, and coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest. His parents, members of Syria’s Catholic minority, had immigrated to the U.S. before he was born, settling into Seattle’s middle class. His mother worked at the public library and his father was a finance professor at Seattle University, where Dibee would eventually study civil engineering and general science. Dibee came of age just as law enforcement in the U.S. was beginning to take notice of the budding animal rights movement.

In 1977, when he was 9 years old, a group called the Undersea Railroad released two dolphins from a University of Hawaii marine laboratory — the first known animal liberation in U.S. history. A countermovement was rapidly launched, led by organizations like the National Association for Biomedical Research, which lobbies for the use of live animals in scientific research.

NABR and other industry groups were way ahead of law enforcement in gathering intelligence on the animal rights movement, and federal agents were happy to make use of the information. In March 1987, for example, FBI agents met with NABR about four chimpanzees that had been abducted from a research laboratory. The group “maintains a large intelligence file on the activities of most of the significant animal rights groups in the world,” an agent noted after the meeting, and “furnished the FBI with many documents which deal with these groups as well as outline their significant activities dating back to 1976.”

The FBI’s account of the meeting is included in documents obtained via public records requests by Ryan Shapiro, executive director of the transparency organization Property of the People. The documents show that throughout the 1990s, the FBI and Justice Department collaborated with a range of industry groups including Americans for Medical Progress, the Fur Commission, the National Board of Fur Farm Organizations, the Foundation for Biomedical Research, and the American Feed Industry Association.

In 1987, the National Association for Biomedical Research supplied the FBI with documents about the activities of animal rights groups going back more than a decade, according to an FBI memo provided to The Intercept by Property of the People. The transparency organization redacted the names of activists who did not grant permission to be identified, to protect their privacy.

In 1987, an animal diagnostics laboratory under construction at the University of California, Davis was burned to the ground — the first U.S. arson claimed by ALF. It was meant “to retaliate in the name of thousands of animals tortured each year in campus labs,” a communique from the saboteurs said.

A month after the arson, a Justice Department public information officer sent a letter to the Fur Retailers Information Council, whose members had also been targeted by the Animal Liberation Front. “I encourage you to send to me any evidence you have indicating criminal activity committed by animal rights activists,” the official wrote. “I am happy to be of assistance to the Fur Retailers Information Council.”

In response, the industry group worked with the Justice Department to create “a directory of some 200 animal rights and animal welfare organizations operating in North America which provides office addresses, names of officers and spokespersons, and a diary of incidents,” according to an October 1988 letter from the council.

The Fur Retailers Information Council worked with the Justice Department to create a directory of 200 animal rights and animal welfare organizations, according to a 1988 letter from the organization.

“We would occasionally contact the [FBI] to ensure they were aware of a threat or action involving animal extremism. We also sent FBI officials occasional alerts about animal rights actions or threats that might be considered illegal,” said Jim Newman, a spokesperson for Americans for Medical Progress, a nonprofit funded by the biomedical industry to foster support for animal research. “There was no concerted effort in place.” The other groups did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment.

In some cases, corporations went beyond intelligence sharing to actively ferreting out activists they viewed as threats. One of the strangest efforts involved Leon Hirsch, a manufacturer of surgical staples whose sales demonstrations involved cutting open live beagles and stapling them back together. His company, United States Surgical Corporation, paid a security firm called Perceptions International to infiltrate the animal rights movement.

Mary Lou Sapone, the firm’s undercover agent, befriended a troubled activist named Fran Trutt, who was subsequently accused of planting a pipe bomb at the headquarters of the surgical corporation in an attempt to murder Hirsch. But Trutt was on the phone with Sapone throughout the day before the alleged murder attempt, and another undercover operative working for the company actually drove her to the crime scene and gave her money for the pipe bomb. Trutt pleaded no contest to attempted murder charges. Despite industry’s role in manufacturing the incident, it would later be presented in a key report to Congress as the only “confirmed case” of an animal rights activist using an incendiary device “with intent of harming an individual.”

Industry groups also lobbied for federal legislation that would heighten penalties for activist tactics. “The DOJ has advised that there is significant special interest pressure on Congress to pass legislation which would protect animal and health research property, facilities and personnel from attacks,” according to a 1990 FBI memo.

Two years later, Congress enacted the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, which created a new crime of “animal enterprise terrorism.” The law was aimed at anyone who physically disrupted or conspired to disrupt an animal enterprise by intentionally damaging or causing the loss of its property. It created a legal pathway to imprison a broad range of saboteurs and their allies.

But the AEPA didn’t lead to the kind of crackdown the biomedical and fur lobbyists sought. The law was used only once before the turn of the century, in the prosecution of two activists who released mink from Wisconsin fur farms. And although the FBI charged a few individuals for eco-arsons throughout the 1990s, it would be the next generation of saboteurs — Dibee’s generation — that would bear the brunt of the government’s crackdown on eco-radicals.

Radical Tactics Reach Their Peak

By the late 1990s, Dibee was known within activist circles, regularly participating in spectacular demonstrations designed to draw attention to moneymaking activity built on animal and ecological suffering.

At the Warner Creek occupation in 1995, activists blockaded a logging road to prevent a timber company from accessing Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. The occupation lasted for nearly a year, thanks in part to 28-year-old Dibee, who designed a “bipod” structure, a precariously rigged platform between two tall poles where activists perched, complicating police efforts to remove them. The federal government, which managed the national forest land, put the company’s timber harvest on hold, as well as 150 other timber sales.

In the summer of 1997, Dibee was involved in another dramatic action, this time to protest the overfishing of pollock in the Bering Sea and the harm it was causing the endangered Steller sea lion. Seven Greenpeace activists planned to dangle from ropes off Seattle’s Aurora Bridge, more than 200 feet above Lake Union, in an effort to block four giant American Seafoods trawlers from entering Puget Sound. A skilled climber, Dibee was to position himself underneath the bridge, maneuvering along its metal support structure to assist the other climbers as needed.

“There was a lot of this macho ‘me big eco-warrior’ thing, where the guys just wanted to be rock stars,” said Helga Kahr, an activist and friend of Dibee’s. But despite his willingness to take risks, she added, “Joe was not like that.” He sewed specialized backpacks for fellow activists, trained friends in computer encryption, and donated money to whatever corner of the movement needed it.

Few of his comrades were aware, however, that Dibee was also involved in the controversial eco-radical underground. In July 1997, the Associated Press published an investigation revealing that 90 percent of the horses rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program ended up in slaughterhouses. Among the buyers named in the article was the Cavel West slaughterhouse. According to court filings, Dibee and four other animal rights activists came up with a plot to strike back.

The activists surrounded the Cavel West facility in Redmond, Oregon, and planted incendiary devices fueled by so-called vegan jello — a mixture of soap and petroleum. They timed them to go off at an hour when they believed the facility would be empty, then fled, stopping to dump their clothing in a hole, which they covered with acid and filled with dirt. An anonymous communique attributed the action to the Animal Liberation Front and the Equine and Zebra Liberation Front. The facility burned to the ground and did not reopen.

The fur and biomedical industries “dramatically increased their efforts to convince the FBI and the DOJ to treat animal rights and environmental protesters as terrorists.”

During the same period, other activists burned down a Forest Service ranger station, set SUVs on fire, and toppled an 80-foot high-voltage transmission tower. The attacks and demonstrations were costly. In response, the fur and biomedical industries “dramatically increased their efforts to convince the FBI and the DOJ to treat animal rights and environmental protesters as terrorists,” said Shapiro of Property of the People. “This was the true genesis of the Green Scare.”

It wasn’t just about arson. Patti Strand, a Dalmatian breeder and co-founder of the National Animal Interest Alliance, which works to “promote responsible animal ownership and use, and to oppose animal rights extremism,” said that after she published her 1998 book on animal extremism she was targeted by radical activists. They put dead animals and garter snakes in her mailbox. “I received letters that included information about my son, who was 11 at the time — what path he was taking to school and that they liked his new green jacket,” she said. When others who had been targeted reached out to Strand with their stories — “If their fences were cut, if there were lawsuits that were going on, if they had started to receive death threats or things that were intimidating” — she would pass along the details to the FBI.

By April 1998, the anti-environmental lobbying campaign was again bearing fruit. The Justice Department held a conference on animal rights terrorism and invited the executive director of the Fur Commission “to address the attendees with her perception of the animal rights terrorism trends, and recommended investigative aids,” according to an FBI summary of the event. Along with federal prosecutors, the attendees included officials from the FBI, the Justice Department’s terrorism and violent crime section, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

The Justice Department held a conference on animal rights terrorism in 1998, inviting the director of the Fur Commission to speak, according to an FBI memo.

Later that year, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “Acts of Ecoterrorism by Radical Environmental Organizations.” U.S. Rep. Frank Riggs, who had accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the forestry industry, described an activist stunt in which a large tree stump was dumped in the middle of his Northern California office. “My office was quite literally assaulted by a group of environmental terrorists,” he said. “Upon responding to the horrific sound, my two female staff members were greeted by the visage of several Earth First! terrorists, one wearing a black ski mask, and another wearing dark goggles and a hood.”

The Fur Commission celebrated. “Over the last year, the people of the fur trade have been key players with other animal and resource-based industries in a concerted effort to push eco and animal rights terrorism up the government’s priority pole,” according to a March 1999 newsletter. “These efforts have resulted in a strong statement of commitment from the FBI.”

Detective Greg Harvey joined the Eugene Police Department’s special investigations unit in June of that year. For the better part of the next decade, solving the string of ALF and ELF arsons would become his primary task.

Harvey’s work on the team coincided with an intense national tug of war over the meaning of terrorism. Indeed, Harvey had his own taxonomy. Blocking a road and trespassing? Not terrorism. The ALF and ELF arsonists? Not in the same category as international terrorists who kill people, but terrorists just the same. “Their whole intent is to change the way things are done,” Harvey told The Intercept. “They’re trying to close down businesses. Well, that’s terrorism. When the families or the workers are afraid to do something, that’s what I consider terrorism.”

“One of the things we were really trying to focus on was breaking the movement,” he said. Harvey and other law enforcement officials went after the group’s omerta — its staunch refusal to cooperate with authorities. “That was one of the things that we broke.”

But it would take a disaster even bigger than the Vail arson to give industry and law enforcement the political capital needed to cripple the movement. “They called us eco-terrorists before 9/11,” said John Sellers, former director of the Ruckus Society, which trains environmental justice organizers in direct action. “But no one really believed them.”

From 9/11 to the Green Scare

Rescue workers were only beginning to survey the damage when Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young picked up a call from an Anchorage Daily News reporter on September 11, 2001. Few details had emerged about who was behind the attacks, but Young was unfazed. “War has been declared as far as terrorists go,” he told the newspaper. “I’m not sure they’re that dedicated, but eco-terrorists — which are really based in Seattle — there’s a strong possibility that could be one of the groups” behind the assault.

Young’s remarks were prescient: Eco-saboteurs would become one of the U.S. government’s lesser-known war on terror adversaries. September 11 was a crisis perfectly suited to the groundwork industry groups had laid in the 1990s, and corporate actors stood ready to exploit it. It didn’t hurt that the saboteurs aligned themselves against capitalism, which was being defended as critical to America’s suddenly imperiled way of life. With political careers freshly dependent on hammering terrorism, eco-sabotage became an easy target.

The attacks “did not set off the Green Scare,” Shapiro said. Instead, “9/11 was exploited by Green Scare warriors to turn up the volume on their surveillance and suppression of the animal rights and eco movements.”

The Patriot Act’s broad new definition of domestic terrorism, signed into law in October 2001, was another step toward institutionalizing the notion that eco-saboteurs were terrorists. The law targets those who commit criminal acts “dangerous to human life” that “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or influence government policy. It also made it easier for the FBI to wiretap and surveil U.S. citizens. Even though a core tenet of ALF and ELF was to avoid harming living things, the Justice Department considered the movement’s acts of arson and vandalism dangerous enough to count.

At the hearing, representatives from both parties offered anti-ALF and ELF soliloquies. “On the morning of December 28, the employees of U.S. Forest Industries arrived at work to find their offices smoldering. The scene is reminiscent of what we saw of the damaged part of the Pentagon after September 11,” said Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden. “It didn’t take a jetliner to destroy this office. An ELF firebomb did the job. And while fortunately there was no loss of life, the destruction was just as severe.”

The domestic terrorism section chief of the FBI, James Jarboe, announced that ALF and ELF were “the No. 1 priority in the domestic terrorism program.”

Rosebraugh tried to turn the tables on his accusers. “If the U.S. government is truly concerned with eradicating terrorism in the world, then that effort must begin with abolishing U.S. imperialism,” he wrote in prepared remarks. “Members of this governing body, both in the House and Senate as well as those who hold positions in the executive branch, constitute the largest group of terrorists and terrorist representatives currently threatening life on this planet.”

Lawmakers at the hearing proposed various legislative fixes, including an Agroterrorism Prevention Act, which would have made activists eligible for the death penalty if someone were to die in one of the arsons. That bill was never passed, but another proposal — an expansion of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act — did become law, with help from industry.

In tandem with politicians’ maneuvers, Quimby and the other law enforcement officers assigned to the arsons were doubling down on capturing the saboteurs. In the summer of 2001, they had met to discuss how they could crack open what had become stubbornly cold cases. “We decided we were going to be much more overt, and we were going to go start knocking on doors,” Quimby said.

Armed with a list of 30 to 40 targets, the lead agent on the case began popping up in coffee shops and neighborhoods where he knew activists would recognize him. “You start to induce a little bit of paranoia,” Quimby explained. The idea was that the activists would start thinking, “Are they on to us? Are they watching me? Are they on my phone? Are they monitoring my email account?” she told The Intercept. “It sewed some seeds of doubt.”

“They called us eco-terrorists before 9/11, but no one really believed them.”

Eugene detective Harvey’s job was to remain unseen. “I lived in the shadows. I basically sat in my car, watching people, buildings,” he said. At one point, he said, he spent hours sitting outside the Castle Superstore where one of the activists worked, in the hopes that Dibee would show up to visit.

The operation zeroed in on Jake Ferguson, who was suspected of being one of the most prolific arsonists. “We were following around Jake Ferguson for months and months,” said Harvey. “You’re looking at a heroin user, which makes him unbelievably paranoid.” Agents from multiple states moved into a shared office in Eugene, where the walls were papered with charts, photos, and timelines.

Quimby doesn’t fully credit 9/11 for the intensified investigation. But “there’s no question that funding that became available as a result of 9/11 may not have been there” if not for the attacks, she said. The ALF and ELF cases “became a priority and a very visible priority.”

By the end of 2001, however, Dibee and fellow activists had begun to move away from radical protest tactics like arson, according to Lauren Regan, a lawyer who would later represent one of the Backfire defendants. “It was causing division, because there was no way to control who was doing what,” she said. “They felt as if, sooner or later, some wildcard would potentially screw something up and kill themselves or kill someone else.” An October 2001 arson, of a hay barn at a Bureau of Land Management holding facility for wild horses, would be the last fire prosecutors attributed to Dibee and other Backfire defendants.

Dibee also had a falling out with one of his closest collaborators in the movement, Jonathan Paul. Paul had participated in the Cavel West arson, and he and Dibee had co-founded an organization called Sea Defense Alliance, which sought to physically disrupt the Makah people’s whale hunt (an action that is hard to imagine in today’s environmental movement, which seeks to follow the lead of Indigenous people).

The two activists sued each other over ownership of the organization’s boat, and at one point, Dibee drove toward Paul’s home with a gun, allegedly planning to confront him, according to law enforcement accounts included in federal court filings. But Dibee got lost and was pulled over by police, and the meeting was averted.

For a time, Dibee appeared to move on with his life, maintaining his adrenaline high by racing cars and flying planes. But the Backfire case was about to break. In 2003, Ferguson, who had a young child to consider, agreed to wear a wire and travel around the U.S., visiting his activist friends and convincing them to talk about the old days.

Breaking the Movement

Among the earliest casualties of the Green Scare was a group known as the SHAC 7. After reporters and undercover activists obtained disturbing footage from inside the laboratories of the research company Huntingdon Life Sciences, a campaign called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty emerged to shut it down. The nerve center of the campaign was a website where administrators posted communiques describing protest actions that targeted not just Huntingdon, but any company or individual that supported it — from clients to investment firms to the club where the CEO played golf. In response to persistent disruptions, dozens of companies severed ties with Huntingdon.

In January 2004, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful organization whose members include legislators and corporate lobbyists, released draft legislation meant to strengthen the Animal Enterprise Protection Act to make it even easier to crack down on activist groups like SHAC. Under ALEC’s model, titled the “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” filming an animal facility without the owners’ consent could be prosecuted as terrorism. ALEC’s version would also have created a “terrorist registry” of anyone convicted under the law.

But prosecutors didn’t need ALEC’s draft legislation to go after SHAC. A few months after the proposal was finalized, seven SHAC organizers were arrested and six were later sentenced to prison terms under the original version of AEPA. They were accused of encouraging and publicizing radical tactics, but not participating in acts of sabotage themselves.

Nor did authorities need a new anti-terrorism law to go after the ALF and ELF arsonists. In December 2005, FBI agents carried out simultaneous arrests in five states. Over the next year, 18 alleged ALF and ELF saboteurs would be accused of participating in a domestic terrorism conspiracy. The feds interviewed Dibee. Then he disappeared.

The pressure on the eco-radicals to inform on their friends in exchange for reduced prison time was immense. Hanging over their heads were terrorism sentencing enhancements developed in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which could increase prison time for a specific list of crimes if they were “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct.” Among the charges that fit the enhancement were arsons of buildings involved in interstate commerce or belonging to the U.S. government. 

Given the prison time at stake, with some facing possible life sentences, nearly every activist shared information. “Some named every name they could,” Harvey said, while others “listed involvement without naming names.”

Prosecutors declined to negotiate with the handful of defendants who refused to cooperate, according to Regan. But that changed overnight, she said, after defense lawyers issued an extensive motion demanding the government reveal whether the National Security Agency or FBI had used warrantless wiretapping or Patriot Act-authorized surveillance against the activists. When the judge supported the motion, and prosecutors changed their tune. “They said, ‘OK, we’ll do a noncooperating plea deal if you’ll drop this motion,’” Regan recalled.

“If I had to choose who was the greater threat, I would obviously go with the ones who were killing people.”

A narrower version of ALEC’s law, introduced by Republican Sen. James Inhofe and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, passed the following November. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, or AETA, left out much of ALEC’s wish list, limiting the law to animal enterprises rather than actions targeting mining, timber harvesting, and fossil fuel extraction. However, it succeeded in criminalizing “interference” in the activities of any entity with a connection to an animal enterprise, a lower bar than AEPA’s “physical disruption.” It also increased the maximum penalty for causing economic damage, from three years in prison to 20, and allowed for up to five years in prison if an action simply caused someone a “reasonable fear of serious bodily injury or death.”

The section that would have criminalized filming at animal facilities was picked up by state lawmakers across the U.S. — “ag gag” bills became law in nine states, though they’ve been overturned as unconstitutional in three, and legal battles continue.

Twelve of the Backfire defendants received terrorism enhancements. They were sentenced to between one and 12 years in prison. One defendant’s status as a “terrorist” was later used to justify his transfer to a communications management unit, where his contact with friends, family, and the public was severely limited.

But it wasn’t prison time that most deeply undermined the movement. “The level of betrayal that took place during the Green Scare and the number of hardcore activists that basically crumbled under minor pressure by the state to become snitches or informants really shook the foundations of the radical movement,” Regan said. “It was very, very difficult for a lot of people to organize and trust each other in the aftermath of that shakeup.”

As for Dibee, the FBI suspected that he sheltered with relatives in Syria. Friends thought he might have died in the violent civil war there. One by one, the other Backfire fugitives were picked up. After 30-year-old New Jersey native Justin Solondz was arrested on drug charges in 2009 in the backpacker community of Dali, China, he pleaded guilty in the U.S. to firebombing the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. Thirty-nine-year-old Rebecca Rubin, who had been hiding in her home nation of Canada, turned herself in in 2012, exhausted by years when “she was forced to live in what is, in some ways, a prison without walls,” as her lawyer told a Maclean’s reporter. She pleaded guilty to freeing wild horses and helping with the Vail arson.

While Dibee was on the lam, Obama’s election drove much of the environmental movement’s energy toward legislative change and away from direct action. The Intercept identified only 13 eco-activist cases prosecuted federally after 2008 — all but two charged under AETA. Six of the cases involved activists freeing mink from fur farms — actions that could hardly be considered terrorism even under the Patriot Act’s broad definition. Four more of the cases were dismissed. “The primary purpose of these laws is to try and brand activists as terrorists in order to turn public opinion against their advocacy and their campaigns,” Regan said.

Meanwhile, Democratic leadership failed to deliver any meaningful response to the deepening climate crisis and resulting biodiversity loss. Rising ocean temperatures caused the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, which Dibee had visited as a kid, to bleach and die. Wildfires burned with more intensity through the desiccated Pacific Northwest forests that he’d fought to protect from the timber industry. Orca whale populations shrunk to perilous levels off the coast of Washington state. And Donald Trump was elected president, paving the way to reverse even the minor steps the Obama administration had taken to challenge corporate polluters.

A Rising Threat Dismissed

Daryl Johnson started at the Department of Homeland Security as a domestic terrorism analyst when eco-terrorism was still one of its major priorities. He didn’t have a problem with that. “I still believe they’re terroristic threats, because it’s ideologically motivated violence against property,” he said. “But if I had to choose who was the greater threat, I would obviously go with the ones who were killing people.”

By 2009, Johnson had come to see right-wing extremism as a severe, rising threat. That April, he became the lead author on an intelligence assessment that found that right-wing movements were using Obama’s election as a recruiting tool. That same month, three police officers in Pittsburgh were ambushed and killed by a man who regularly posted on the white supremacist website Stormfront. “Lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States,” the report concluded.

The report was leaked, and the backlash was swift. Conservative groups were particularly offended by its suggestion that veterans might be vulnerable to recruitment by far-right groups. Everyone from Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner to the American Legion released statements deriding it.

At first, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano defended Johnson’s work. “We must protect the country from terrorism whether foreign or homegrown, and regardless of the ideology that motivates its violence,” she said in a statement a week after the report was published. But after 20 conservative groups put out ads calling for her to resign, she backtracked, claiming there had been a breakdown in internal review processes and promising to replace the report.

“Their whole intent is to change the way things are done. … Well, that’s terrorism.

In contrast to the crackdown on eco-radicals, DHS stepped back from focusing on domestic terrorism altogether. Johnson’s unit was gutted, and he left the agency along with many of his peers.

“It sent a chilling effect in the law enforcement and intelligence community. They saw what happened to me and how my unit was politicized,” he told The Intercept. As a result, “you have 10 years of attacks almost,” said Johnson, who now works as a consultant on domestic extremism. “Lots of people have died. The threat [of far-right groups] is still very active right now, and so it’s thriving.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, between 2002 and 2018, 80 percent of extremist-related murders in the U.S. were carried out by people linked to right-wing movements. Only 3 percent were linked to left-wing ideologies, and 17 percent to Islamic movements. Every single extremist killing in 2018 — 50 in all — had a link to a right-wing movement.

Journalist and civil liberties advocate Will Potter, whose book “Green Is the New Red” exposed industry influence over Green Scare-style prosecutions, argues that the federal focus on animal rights activists over right-wing extremists was driven by more than corporate lobbying. “Beliefs that motivate [animal rights] activists were presented as this ideological threat to core concepts that underpin what some people think it means to be an American — defense of capitalism, a religiously aligned state, defense of industry, the belief that humans are exceptional.”

In contrast, many of America’s foundational values — Christianity, individualism, gun rights, and white supremacy — align with those of right-wing extremists. As Johnson put it, right-wing groups “operate under some of the same values that [I], an FBI agent, might believe.”

Shapiro went even further: “No shit the FBI doesn’t like to go after right-wing groups. They’re on the same team.”

A New Generation

In October 2016, as thousands of opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline gathered in protest camps in North Dakota, activists simultaneously turned above-ground valves on five tar sands oil pipelines across the U.S., shutting off the oil’s flow in solidarity with the Standing Rock tribe. They livestreamed the actions and stayed on site, awaiting arrest.

Less than a year later, holes burned using welding tools began appearing on valves along the Dakota Access pipeline. Two pipeline activists, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, called a press conference to claim responsibility for the sabotage.

In response to the resurgence of direct action tactics, 84 members of Congress, including four Democrats, sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in October 2017 asking whether “the attacks against this nation’s energy infrastructure, which pose a threat to human life, and appear to be intended to intimidate and coerce policy changes,” fell within the Justice Department’s understanding of domestic terrorism.

“Just because time passes doesn’t mean the FBI forgets.”

The American Petroleum Institute praised the letter and told the industry publication Natural Gas Intelligence that the group was working with the Trump administration on the issue, including the Justice Department and the FBI. “A key component of securing our nation’s energy infrastructure is ensuring that law enforcement has the tools needed to prosecute those who attack it,” an institute spokesperson said.

As if on cue, ALEC entered the fray. By December 2017, it had introduced a model Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which would increase penalties for trespassing on or inhibiting the operations of oil and gas pipelines. Under the model, “conspirator” organizations, such as activist groups, would face a fine several times that of the trespasser. Eight states are considering versions of the law, and industry groups and oil and gas companies, including Dakota Access parent company Energy Transfer Partners, have been lobbying on its behalf.

“It’s the corporate state bringing out the same old tired playbook and repeating the same plays again and again,” said Regan.

While legislators’ efforts haven’t yet translated into Green Scare-style prosecutions, their enthusiasm reveals that the anti-eco-terror framework built in the 1990s and strengthened in the wake of 9/11 could easily be deployed again.

On August 10, the FBI held a press conference to announce it had captured Dibee. “Just because time passes doesn’t mean the FBI forgets,” FBI agent Tim Suttles, who worked the Operation Backfire case for 14 years, said in a statement. “We are very gratified to have Dibee in custody.”

Dibee’s lawyer declined to comment. But if his case turns out like those of his co-defendants, he’ll probably negotiate a guilty plea. The judge is likely to consider a terrorism enhancement, and Dibee will be sentenced to years in prison.

Harvey, the Oregon detective who spent years trying to catch Dibee, learned of the arrest from a friend who’s still working on the case. “I was extremely happy,” he told The Intercept.

Quimby, the former FBI agent, was similarly gratified. “When Joe was picked up, it was sort of cool, like one more down, one to go.”

But she knows it’s not over. One Backfire defendant, Josephine Overaker, remains missing. “She speaks fluent Spanish and may seek employment as a firefighter, midwife, sheep tender, or masseuse,” the FBI said in its press release announcing Dibee’s capture.

“With Overaker still out there the case isn’t closed,” Quimby said. “It won’t be until she comes into custody.”

Source documents used in this reporting were obtained by Property of the People and shared exclusively with The Intercept. You can learn more about Property of the People’s work litigating Freedom of Information Act requests here.

The post How a Movement That Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

Within days, the gesture became the symbol of a movement for police accountability and racial justice the nation had not seen since the civil rights era. And the refrain protesters began chanting that night — “Hands up, don’t shoot” — would soon be replaced by one that would echo across the country for years to come: Black lives matter.

Davis, who was 22 at the time, kept showing up as the protests grew larger and angrier, and as scores of law enforcement descended on Ferguson wearing riot gear and firing tear gas. Days after Brown’s death, during a short-lived break in the looting and police violence, Davis was photographed wearing all black and directing traffic; the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which he had joined on the heels of Brown’s killing, was keeping the peace.

Days later, Davis emailed a local reporter who had covered the NBPP’s peacekeeping efforts to thank him for portraying “the true nature and the intent” of the party, which, despite taking its name, is not affiliated with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. “For the record we the NBPP and its local chapter members have and never [sic] promoted acts of violence towards anyone or any establishment or businesses,” Davis wrote to the Riverfront Times, a St. Louis weekly. “True enough there are people so angry that they show their pain and emotions with aggression towards cops and frankly anything that they can get their hands on. But let these few not distort the genuine peaceful intention and benevolence of the NBPP.”

Three months later, Davis and another young man named Brandon Orlando Baldwin were arrested in an FBI sting and accused of planning to plant bombs, kill officials connected to the Brown case, and blow up St. Louis’s iconic Gateway Arch.

Ideological Make-Believe

Three years later, the FBI listed Davis’s case in a secret memo warning of the rise of a “black identity extremist” movement whose members’ “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” spurred what the FBI claimed was “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.” Although Baldwin was convicted of the same crimes, the FBI report inexplicably only mentioned one suspect.

The “black identity extremism” report was prepared by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, part of the bureau’s Counterterrorism Division, and was distributed to scores of local and federal law enforcement partners across the country. Although Davis and Baldwin were not charged under anti-terrorism laws, they do appear to be the first individuals retroactively labeled by the FBI as “black identity extremists.”

The FBI report was written six months into the Trump administration — as white supremacist groups felt emboldened by support for their ideology seemingly coming from the very top of the government — and was released only a week before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist ran down and killed Heather Heyer. When the report was leaked to Foreign Policy later in 2017, it prompted fierce and widespread criticism from activists, civil rights advocates, and lawmakers, many of whom accused the FBI of reverting to the surveillance and sabotage of black activists that had defined its activities in the civil rights era.

Critics called the report’s contents “fiction,” “fantasy,” “weak” and “irresponsible.” Several noted that it seemed designed to distract attention from the reality of police abuse against minorities. “The feds have invented a title — BIE — and linked it to a handful of episodes of violence,” wrote Andrew Cohen, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “To deflect legitimate criticism of police tactics, to undermine a legitimate protest movement that has emerged in the past three years to protest police brutality, the FBI has tarred the dissenters as domestic terrorists, an organized group with a criminal ideology that are a threat to police officers.”

“Whenever you create an assumption that somebody poses a physical threat to law enforcement, that provides incentive for law enforcement to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Yet even more worrisome than the report’s political implications is the immediate threat to life that labeling someone a “terrorist” can pose, especially as the FBI has no way to monitor what law enforcement departments do with the reports it distributes. For many black people, already accustomed to being uniquely vulnerable to police violence, the fear is that being viewed as potential terrorists for expressing legitimate political grievances might give police license to target them even more intensely than they already do.

“Not only can they go after these people with surveillance, but they can then justify using the most aggressive, violent tactics,” said Justin Hansford, a St. Louis activist and law professor who heads the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. “Whenever you create an assumption that somebody poses a physical threat to law enforcement, that provides incentive for law enforcement to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2017, shortly after the report was leaked to the press, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the FBI investigates as domestic terrorism only cases involving federal crimes that include the use or attempted use of violence in furtherance of political or social goals. “We don’t have that, we don’t investigate,” Wray said. “It doesn’t matter whether they are right-wing, left-wing, or any other wing.”

At the hearing, Wray said that the “black identity extremism” report was based on both open-source information and ongoing FBI investigations. He also said, citing no specific numbers, that the bureau had “about 50 percent more” investigations of white supremacists than it did of “black identity extremists.” In subsequent meetings with lawmakers, he said he was unfamiliar with any investigations of “black identity extremists.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the FBI wrote that the agency “does not police ideology.” The bureau, she added, will only initiate an investigation if there is an allegation of a federal crime or a threat to national security. “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity,” the spokesperson wrote. “When an individual takes violent action based on belief or ideology — and breaks the law — the FBI will enforce the rule of law. The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of their constitutional rights, and we remain committed to protecting those rights for all Americans.”

The FBI declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about how various ideologies are presented, downplayed, or emphasized in threat assessment reports that the agency routinely circulates to law enforcement, or about how those reports might impact surveillance and policing of targeted communities, regardless of the threats they pose. At the 2017 Judiciary Committee hearing, as well as at a second hearing before the same committee in June 2018, Wray also failed to address those questions.

“My big concern is that local law enforcement will misinterpret that and will clamp down on people exercising their First Amendment rights,” Rep. Karen Bass, one of the report’s fiercest critics in Congress, told him at the first hearing.

While several news reports referred to the case of Christopher Daniels, a Texas activist who advocated for the rights of black gun owners, as the first known prosecution of a “black identity extremist,” the FBI appears to have retroactively used that label to refer to individuals it started surveilling as early as 2014, on the heels of the Ferguson protests. Daniels, who also went by the name Rakem Balogun, was indicted of a weapons offense months after the release of the FBI report, but a judge dismissed the charge last May. The FBI declined to comment on any of these cases, as well as on the origins of the “black identity extremist” label.

“This was literally picking six random events and then imagining a movement around them.”

None of the other five individuals referenced in the FBI’s 2017 report were federally prosecuted. They include three black men who attacked and, in two cases, killed, police officers in New York, Baton Rouge, and Dallas, though the FBI’s report fails to connect their actions to any specific group or clear ideology. A man who shot at two police stations in Indiana in October 2016 and another who drove his car toward three police officers in Arizona in September 2016 — both of whom were prosecuted on state charges — also appear to have acted independently of any groups or discernible ideology. Three were killed by police on the scene.

Davis himself, while he had recently joined the New Black Panther Party, was found to have plotted the St. Louis bombings without the group’s knowledge or support. And he was also known to police as a devotee of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a black variation of the overwhelmingly white sovereign citizen movement, a domestic extremist ideology well known to the FBI.

The only connection between the six men referenced in the report, besides their race, is a thread of anger at police that is common among tens of thousands of Americans who never committed or intended to commit acts of violence. “In all of them, there is no connection to any national movement; the cases are not linked in any way,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. “This was literally picking six random events and then imagining a movement around them.”

“This is not just a failure of an intelligence product, but a dangerous intelligence product,” German added. “It spreads misinformation rather than intelligence.”

The Bomb Plot

On November 21, 2014, three months after Brown’s killing, Davis and Baldwin were arrested in an FBI sting and indicted in federal court on weapons charges, accused of making false statements to buy guns at a Cabela’s store where Baldwin worked.

Three days later, a grand jury declined to charge Wilson for Brown’s death. As protests once again engulfed St. Louis, news outlets citing unnamed law enforcement sources reported that Davis and Baldwin had bought what they thought was a pipe bomb and had plans to buy two more from undercover agents, and that they intended to blow up the city’s celebrated arch and kill St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson. In a packed courtroom, the friends and families of the accused dismissed those accusations as “lies,” while the New Black Panther Party’s national leadership called them a “FRAME UP attempt.” Davis’s wife, who was pregnant and due in two weeks, fainted in court and went into early labor.

The most explosive allegations against Davis and Baldwin were not detailed in the original court filings. But in a revised federal indictment filed months after their arrest, the two were charged with additional crimes, including attempting to “damage and destroy, by means of explosives, a building, vehicle and other property.”

If the court documents were light on detail, the press coverage was not. In the heated atmosphere that followed the Ferguson protests, many news outlets hyped the story, writing headlines that mischaracterized Davis and Baldwin as affiliates of the “Black Panthers,” and letting anonymous law enforcement sources drive the narrative around their alleged scheme. The press picked on the story’s most salacious details: Davis and Baldwin had planned to buy more bombs, several outlets reported, but had been unable to do so because they were waiting for funds to be disbursed to “a girlfriend’s” EBT card — a detail, presumably leaked by law enforcement, that turned out to be false.

According to their nearly identical sentencing plea agreements, Davis and Baldwin, who met during the protests over Brown’s killing, discussed acquiring guns and bombs and wanting to organize Ferguson protesters to “be like an army.” Baldwin told an FBI informant that he wanted to “build bombs and blow things up.”

“We are at war, you understand, bro,” he told the informant. According to Baldwin’s plea, Davis “put it out there that he was a terrorist” — a reference that appears to have been scrapped from Davis’s own plea. The Gateway Arch, which according to earlier accounts had been the pair’s main target, was never actually mentioned in conversations recorded by law enforcement, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Richard Callahan, then-U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri, said in a statement after the guilty plea that the disruption of the plot days before the grand jury’s rejection of charges against Wilson “undoubtedly saved lives. Luckily for all of us, we’ll never know just how many.” But that seemed to contradict an earlier interview, in which he had said that a lot of Davis’s and Baldwin’s ideas were “totally unrealistic and impractical, and we didn’t include [in the indictment] all of the things they rambled on about, to not sensationalize the case or make it more than it is.” Callahan did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Kenneth Tihen, a lead prosecutor in the case, declined to comment.

Davis and Baldwin pleaded guilty to explosives and gun charges in June 2015, and in September 2015 they were sentenced to seven-year prison terms. (Davis’s father told The Intercept that before their plea, prosecutors had threatened his son with the possibility of 30 years in prison.)

At sentencing, Davis called his actions “reckless, irresponsible and just stupid.” Baldwin’s attorney said on behalf of his client that Baldwin also apologized for “his stupidity.” Davis’s attorney did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment; Baldwin’s declined to comment. Davis and Baldwin, who are currently in prison, could not be reached for comment.

But those close to them maintain that their ordeal was a classic case of entrapment.

“They wanted to set an example through my son to show that we are onto you all. The FBI, the federal government, is onto you activist people. We’re watching you; this can happen to you too.”

“He was tricked,” Henry Davis, Olajuwon Davis’s father, told The Intercept. “They wanted to set an example through my son to show that we are onto you all. The FBI, the federal government, is onto you activist people. We’re watching you; this can happen to you too.”

Henry Davis said that FBI “agents” befriended his son during the Ferguson protests, then offered him money, marijuana, and hotel stays. They later moved into his apartment complex and spent weeks hanging out with him, talking about “the resistance.”

His son, he said, felt obligated to do what they asked. “They pretended to be part of the whole movement, said that they wanted to be down,” Henry Davis said. He added that FBI agents gave his son and Baldwin the money they used to buy the guns, claiming that they couldn’t buy the weapons themselves because of felony records. But the same agents later insisted that Davis and Baldwin pay for the pipe bombs with their own money. That should have made his son suspicious, Henry Davis said.

“I’m not trying to justify his actions, because I’m ashamed, and I’ve expressed my disappointment to my son,” said Henry Davis. But, he added, “Olajuwon never had the intention of harming anyone. He’s actually harmless. … They got him.”

Baldwin’s father, Berlin Baldwin Jr., also told The Intercept that his son was caught in a trap. “If you believe in what you hear on TV, yeah, you would think he was a terrorist,” he said. The elder Baldwin readily admitted that his son made a mistake and committed a crime, but added, “He is not no terrorist. They just went after somebody and wrapped him up in it. And he’s none of what they’re saying. Just none of that stuff is true.”

Daniels, the Dallas gun activist who federal authorities tried and failed to prosecute as a “black identity extremist,” put it more bluntly. “A lot of people in this movement are not fully developed and mature individuals,” he told The Intercept, noting that he himself had staved off entrapment attempts by law enforcement. “If I go to any white college in America and talk to a whole bunch of 20-year-olds, and be like, ‘Hey man, I got some grenades, would you like to buy some?’ — somebody’s going to buy them. It’s like offering a gun to a baby.”

“Moorish” Citizens

Brandon Orlando Baldwin appears to have been politicized by the protests over Brown’s killing. Three days after the shooting, Baldwin changed his Facebook profile picture to one of himself wearing a black beret — a symbol of the Black Panthers — and in the following months, his social media posts alternated between enraged comments about police brutality and pictures of himself with his young daughter.

To his family, Baldwin’s arrest came as a shock, his father told The Intercept. His parents had not even known that he had started going to the protests in Ferguson until a family friend told his father that he had seen him on TV. “I immediately called him and said, What the hell are you doing?” Berlin Baldwin Jr. said.

“He might have been a protester, but he’s not an activist,” the senior Baldwin added, arguing that his son was young, naive, and new to the world of protests and activism. “To me and the family, we feel that he was brainwashed. … It was just a big mistake in his life, thinking that he was joining something that was important, being young.”

Davis had a longer history of political engagement. He had been a valedictorian in high school and won a full scholarship to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he was studying economics, his father told The Intercept. Davis was also a promising actor, and in 2013 he starred in an award-winning independent film that was released last year. “The story surrounding his arrest and crime aren’t a full picture,” Robert Herrera, the film’s director, said in an interview. “I think people would have a hard time reconciling who they see on screen versus what they read about him — and I think that is something to think about when you read about all the young minorities out in this country who are considered irredeemable criminals.”

“The bureau’s fever dreams of leftist subversion have undermined American efforts for social justice.”

In college, inspired by an African history class, Davis learned about the Moorish movement, a group that’s grown considerably in recent years, whose beliefs are a mixture of sovereign citizen ideology — a historically right-wing and white supremacist ideology whose adherents reject the legitimacy of government institutions — and devotion to the Moorish Science Temple of America. The senior Davis, who is a vocal Trump supporter and hopes the president will pardon his son, had dreamed that Olajuwon Davis would become the first black secretary of the Treasury. But to his father’s horror, Davis joined the Moors, dropped out of college, and moved back to St. Louis. “The Moors convinced him that he was too black and too powerful to work for the government,” his father said.

Because they reject government authority, including that of law enforcement, sovereign citizens are perceived by police agencies as a top threat. But the FBI’s “black identity extremism” report, while noting “sparse evidence” of a convergence of sovereign citizen extremism and Moorish beliefs, said that the connection is clearest in the production of fraudulent personal identification documents. “Not all self-identified Moors are sovereign citizens, and not all sovereign citizen Moors engage in violence against law enforcement or other illegal activity,” the FBI conceded in the report.

Davis filed an “Abjuration of Citizenship” document with the Moorish nation movement, according to the Anti-Defamation League, and declared himself an “aboriginal indigenous Moorish national of Northwest Amexem,” the Moorish name for North America.

He carried a Moorish ID and said he had been tased and arrested in 2013 after attempting to make a “tax-free” purchase at a gas station using the ID. In social media posts, he described St. Louis as a “Slave Capital in a Slave State!” and the Gateway Arch as a “Symbol of Our destruction and demise.” According to his father, Davis met out-of-state members of the New Black Panther Party after Brown’s killing and was quickly recruited to lead the group’s local chapter. He befriended two FBI informants shortly thereafter.

In prison, Davis has been taking classes, reading Paulo Coelho novels, recording himself reading books to his children, and volunteering to support fellow inmates who were placed on suicide watch, he wrote last year in a letter to the judge who sentenced him. “I recognize that my incarceration was due to my failure to adhere to the principles of unwavering faith and affirming peace in thought and in action,” he wrote. “My imprisonment has given me the chance to once again develop a perspective that is sound and humane.”

Egregious “Bothsidesism”

As protests over Brown’s killing intensified in Ferguson and spilled across the country over the next months and years, so did the FBI’s scrutiny of protesters. In November 2014, days before the Ferguson grand jury’s decision and Davis and Baldwin’s arrest, the bureau circulated an internal bulletin warning law enforcement of “Potential Criminal Reactions to Missouri Grand Jury Announcement.” Two years later, after protests against police brutality had engulfed Baltimore, Chicago, and several other cities, the FBI again issued an intelligence bulletin, warning that “Black Separatist Extremists’ Call for Retaliation in Response to Police-Involved Incidents Could Incite Acts of Violence against Law Enforcement.”

By 2017, the FBI had given this presumed threat a new name: Black Identity Extremism, or what the bureau claimed was a growing, violent, and racially motivated movement targeting law enforcement. Filled with innuendo and stereotypes, the 12-page report that first introduced the label was written so imprecisely that the very definition of a “black identity extremist” was left grammatically incomplete, making its meaning unclear:

The FBI defines black identity extremists as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States.

The report also explicitly connected its analysis to the Ferguson protests, focusing on incidents of what it called “premeditated attacks against law enforcement officers since 2014.”

“The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since [Ferguson] have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity, within the BIE movement,” it noted, adding that agency had “high confidence” in its assessment. “The FBI further judges it is very likely BIEs proactively target police and openly identify and justify their actions with social-political agendas commensurate with their perceived injustices against African Americans, and in some cases, their identified affiliations with violent extremist groups.”

Hansford, the activist and professor, told The Intercept that law enforcement took legitimate grievances about a broken system as personal attacks against them, and fabricated a nonexistent threat to repress criticism. “The Black Lives Matter protesters and other black protesters oftentimes are protesting the police themselves, so it’s a situation of self-interest where [police] feel personally attacked,” he said. “The problem is there really hasn’t been a major [African-American] group that has in any way, shape, or form been a tangible threat to law enforcement, physically, since the Black Liberation Army,” Hansford added, citing a militant black nationalist group active in the 1970s. “It’s been over 40 years.”

Lawmakers also condemned the report. In addition to Wray’s meetings with the Congressional Black Caucus and testimonies about it at two separate House Judiciary Committee hearings, Bass memorably grilled then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the report’s claims at a different committee hearing. Sessions said he hadn’t read the report and couldn’t name an African-American organization that had committed violence against police. Moments after Bass asked him whether he considered the Ku Klux Klan to be “white identity extremists,” Sessions quipped that the names of any white supremacist groups were “not coming to me at this moment.”

Despite a barrage of criticism the FBI did not retract or amend the report. Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2017, Wray said that the FBI would not “withdraw intelligence assessments based on public outcry.” Appearing before that committee again, in June 2018, he offered no answers to some legislators’ questions about who exactly had written the report and based on what premises, but he said that their feedback “prompted us to go back and take a very hard look at how we are bucketing the different categories of domestic terrorism.” “I think it’s been a useful learning experience for us,” Wray said, “and I expect we will see some changes in how we do things going forward.” Still, to date, the FBI has issued no clarification or amendment to the report.

But the “black identity extremism” report wasn’t the only one the FBI produced that year warning about the threat posed by a nonexistent ideological group. As Jezebel reported in January, the FBI in 2017 issued a similar alert about what it called “pro-choice extremists.”

In a one-page memo obtained via public records request by the government transparency group Property of the People, the FBI lists the new category of made-up extremists along actually existing “pro-life extremists” under the common banner of “Abortion Extremism Ideology.” As was the case with “black identity extremism,” the FBI concedes in the report that its own evidence for claiming that such an ideology exists is scant. “Only one pro-choice extremist has been prosecuted,” the report notes. “And that person acted independently and without any direct affiliation to a pro-choice group.”

As Jezebel notes, that is a reference to Theodore Shulman, who served three years in prison for harassing and threatening to kill two leaders of the anti-abortion movement. The only killing of an anti-abortion activist came at the hands of a mentally ill man who had also killed someone else that day, and that showed no signs of being motivated by ideology.

The documents obtained by Property of the People also give a sense of how these reports might be put to use by law enforcement. In one email published by the group, a Washington state sheriff shares the FBI material with his staff with the following warning: “Attached is the latest and greatest about groups we should be aware of. Some of them operate in Eastern Washington.”

Property of the People called the equation of imaginary “pro-choice extremism” to the real “pro-life extremism,” whose adherents have murdered at least a dozen doctors and abortion providers, “an especially egregious case of ‘bothsidesism.’”

“The term ‘terrorist’ is so nebulous, it’s so abstract. Anything they don’t like, they’ll call terrorist.”

“The FBI has a long, sad history of targeting progressive movements as threats to national security,” Ryan Shapiro, the group’s executive director, told The Intercept. “From the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements to the animal rights, anti-fascist, pro-choice, and Black Lives Matter movements today, the bureau’s fever dreams of leftist subversion have undermined American efforts for social justice.”

The FBI has also done little to address criticism that while it has long warned of the “persistent” threat posed by white supremacist groups — and even investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, as The Intercept has reported — it has grossly undercounted the violent incidents stemming from white supremacist ideology. While a May 2017 FBI report argued that “lone actors and small cells” within the white supremacist extremist movement “will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence,” that report minimized the level of violence coming from these individuals, listing only “one lethal and five potentially lethal attacks” carried out by white supremacist extremists in 2016 and omitting, for instance, the case of Brent Ward Luyster, a neo-Nazi who murdered three people in 2016 while under FBI investigation.

Between 2008 and 2017, “right-wing extremists” were responsible for 274 murders — more than 70 percent of all murders carried out by domestic extremists, according to a review by the ADL. And of 34 extremist-related murders in 2017, 59 percent were related to right-wing extremism, including 53 percent involving individuals who explicitly espoused white supremacist views. But many of those cases were rarely discussed by officials in terms of domestic terrorism, nor were the accused charged under anti-terrorism laws, even though they appeared to be motivated by a clear ideology.

Instead, as The Intercept’s analysis revealed, the Justice Department applied anti-terrorism laws against only 34 of 268 right-wing extremists it prosecuted for crimes that appear to meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism — while also targeting 17 environmental and animal rights activists with anti-terrorism laws.

“They view terrorism through a distorted lens that overemphasizes nonviolent acts by groups opposed to government policy over acts of violence against marginalized groups here in the United States,” said German, the former FBI agent, referring to the agency. “The language is intentionally malleable because they want to include certain acts and exclude other similar acts, depending on who is committing them or who the victim of the crime is.”

“The reason they’re able to do this is because the term ‘terrorist’ is so nebulous, it’s so abstract. Anything they don’t like, they’ll call terrorist,” echoed Hansford, the activist and law professor. “They will always resist having a more precise definition of terrorism because they want to use it as a tool to basically go after whoever they want to go after.”

The FBI’s “BIE List”

In addition to the case of Davis and Baldwin — which the FBI report inexplicably describes as involving only one unnamed suspect — the “black identity extremism” report mentions the deadly shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge in the summer of 2016. Those shootings followed the police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, which were caught on video and reignited the national outrage sparked by Brown’s killing two years earlier. The report also lists nonfatal attacks on police in New York, Indiana, and Arizona.

But despite the FBI’s efforts to group the incidents together, there is no evidence that the perpetrators knew each other, belonged to any common groups, or subscribed to the same set of beliefs. Instead, the cases present a mix of resentment toward police, anger at the treatment of minorities, and mental health issues. At least two of the men referenced had expressed sovereign citizen beliefs: one was a Muslim convert who had shown fascination with jihadi violence, and two were military veterans who had sought treatment for symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. In many cases, the ideologies that law enforcement has attributed to them appear to have been based on FBI agents scrolling through comments the men had made on social media.

Three of the six referenced in the report were killed before their motives could be tested in court. Micah Johnson, who on July 7, 2016, shot and killed five law enforcement officers and wounded several others at a Dallas protest against police violence, told police negotiators before being killed in a standoff that “he was upset about recent police shootings and white people, and expressed a desire to kill white people, especially white officers,” according to the FBI report. The report notes that Johnson had “searched and liked social media pages of BIE and black separatist groups” and “appeared to have been influenced by BIE ideology.” It also cites news reports saying that he had been “ousted from a local BIE group for being too radical.” It’s unclear what groups the FBI was referring to, since “black identity extremist” organizations do not exist.

Gavin Eugene Long, who shot six Baton Rouge police officers on July 17, 2016, killing three, had used “black separatist rhetoric” on social media and in a manifesto he left behind, in which he described his actions “as a necessary evil … in order to create substantial change,” the FBI report notes, adding that Long had also declared himself a “Moor,” changed his “slave” name to a Moorish name, and was carrying a Moorish identification card at the time of his death. In videos and tweets posted shortly before the shooting, Long had praised Johnson, the Dallas shooter. He added, if “anything happens to me … don’t affiliate me with anybody.”

The cases present a mix of resentment toward police, anger at the treatment of minorities, and mental health issues.

Both Johnson and Long were military veterans. Johnson had sought treatment for anxiety, depression, and hallucinations after returning from Afghanistan in 2014, according to the Veterans Health Administration, and he had reportedly told doctors that he heard voices and mortars exploding, and that he had panic attacks and nightmares. Long, who served with the Marines in Iraq between 2008 and 2009, had told doctors that he experienced symptoms of PTSD, though his ultimate diagnosis was “adjustment disorder with depressed mood.”

The FBI report also lists the case of Zale Thompson, who attacked four New York police officers with a hatchet in October 2014, injuring two. According to the report, Thompson had tattoos that “indicated he was affiliated with a black separatist extremist group” and “pocket litter indicating he may have been associated with another black separatist group.” The FBI report cites “law enforcement reporting” as its source, but doesn’t mention that Thompson also appeared to have become fascinated by Islamic State propaganda videos and jihadi rhetoric.

Finally, the report listed the cases, though not the names, of Damoine Wilcoxson and Marc Laquon Payne. Wilcoxson was sentenced to 37 years in Indiana state prison after shooting at two Indianapolis police stations in 2016, leaving behind delirious handwritten notes saying, “White must die.” Payne was accused of plowing his car into three officers in Arizona that same year. Authorities indicated that Payne, who has pleaded not guilty and is facing trial later this year, was impaired at the time and that his motives were unknown, but the FBI report notes that Payne’s social media accounts “indicated that he was tied to a BIE group and a Moorish group and that he was angry over police shootings since at least the killing of Brown in 2014.”

But while the FBI stretched its definition of “black identity extremism” to include a disparate series of disconnected cases, white criminal suspects’ connections to extremist groups are often discounted, German said. “There’s evidence that the shooter in Las Vegas had expressed some anti-government views that are in line with some far-right groups, but you don’t see this rush to say he was a far-right extremist and to attribute those deaths to far-right extremism in the United States,” he said, referring to the massacre of 59 people at a country music concert in 2017. “That’s where the politics of this kind of approach are very damaging and divisive in American society, because they do tend to reflect political views rather than the threat of violence.”

Rakem’s Story

The case of Rakem Balogun is often characterized as the first attempted federal prosecution of a “black identity extremist” since the FBI report about the supposed ideology. Balogun is a Dallas-based former Marine and a member of Guerrilla Mainframe, a pan-African group with a broad agenda ranging between universal health care and the abolition of the U.S. Constitution. He was also a member of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which promotes the Second Amendment rights of African-Americans.

Balogun, whose legal name is Christopher Daniels, was arrested in December 2017, when officers in riot gear pulled him and his 15-year-old son out of their house and forced them to stand outside in the cold, handcuffed and in their underwear. Balogun spent the next five months in jail on a single illegal firearms possession charge, while prosecutors tried and failed to paint him as a domestic terrorist. At his detention hearing, where Balogun was denied bail, an FBI agent testified that he had been under surveillance for two years, since video of him at an open-carry rally against police brutality circulated online, including on the right-wing conspiracy site InfoWars.

The video shows protesters, including Balogun, chanting, “The only good pig is a pig that’s dead” and “Oink oink, bang bang.” Balogun’s Facebook page “openly and publicly advocates violence toward law enforcement,” the FBI agent said. On the first anniversary of the July 2016 Dallas police shooting, Balogun posted several comments that appeared to celebrate shooter Micah Johnson. “Today one year ago one Black Man brought Dallas Pig Department to their knees,” he wrote.

Today, Balogun says he always suspected that he was being watched. “Anybody that knows a little bit about the history of black activism would know that once you become politically involved as a black person, especially as somebody who counters popular politics, that you will be watched,” he told The Intercept months after a judge ordered his release. “I don’t mind having an audience. I’m not doing anything illegal and I don’t advocate for anything illegal.”

“The thing about it is, a lot of mature black nationalists, militants, are not into the concept of going to war with the police or the state or anything of that nature,” he added, noting that he espouses what he called “scientific revolutionary socialism,” and that he believes in an individual’s right to self-defense.

Ultimately, the case against Balogun hinged on an accusation that he was prohibited from owning a gun due to a 10-year-old misdemeanor conviction for domestic assault in another state. Prosecutors tried to convince him to take a plea deal, he said. “Their plan was for me to be weak and sign for six months, and to feel guilty for being a black activist who promotes a culture of self-defense and self-preservation in a white nation. … That’s really the crime,” he told The Intercept. He refused to take a deal.

Balogun, who has long been an advocate for gun rights, said he’s used to the double standard applied to black gun owners. Perhaps the most infamous example of that is Philando Castile, who was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop, which his girlfriend streamed on Facebook Live. Castile was a legal gun owner and told the officer he had a gun, but he was shot anyway while reaching for his license as ordered. Balogun told The Intercept that while police officers are generally friendly with open-carry demonstrators in Texas, black open-carry demonstrators routinely receive more hostile treatment.

A federal judge ultimately dismissed the gun charge against him, but Balogun lost his job and home, and missed his newborn daughter’s first months while he was in jail. He says he is now considering legal action to obtain whatever surveillance material the government may have gathered on him. Wray said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in June 2017 that he was not familiar with Balogun’s case.

Babu Omowale, a founder and director of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, told The Intercept that he is sure Balogun was not the only member under surveillance. The group, which is named after a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, is mostly made up of former members or the New Black Panther Party who have focused their activism on gun rights and self-defense in the black community, mostly staging open-carry rallies, neighborhood patrols, and in one case, counterdemonstrating as an anti-Muslim group rallied outside a Dallas mosque.

“We see them sitting outside of our meetings, watching us, but it’s not going to stop us from organizing our people,” said Omowale, referring to the FBI. “We’ve known about it since the 1960s, when J. Edgar Hoover was over the counterintelligence program where he sought out black leadership.”

COINTELPRO 2.0

The FBI’s leaked memo, as well as evidence that had already emerged that the FBI was targeting black activists for surveillance, drew widespread comparisons to the notorious COINTELPRO, a program aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, and sabotaging the civil rights, anti-war, and black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. “Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the original ‘Black Identity Extremists,’” a HuffPost column noted. Several people called the FBI report “COINTELPRO 2.0.” The FBI itself referred to the civil rights era in its 2017 report, retroactively applying its new “black identity extremist” label to the now-defunct Black Liberation Army. “BIEs have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans,” the report argued. “BIE violence peaked in the 1960s and 1970s in response to changing socioeconomic attitudes and treatment of blacks during the Civil Rights Movement.”

Under the COINTELPRO umbrella, the FBI went from tracking King’s every move and attempting to smear him, to surveilling Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, including by obtaining a floor map of his apartment, before Chicago police shot about 90 rounds into the apartment in 1969, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark. At the same time, they routinely failed to intervene as white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan engaged in a sustained campaign of violence against civil rights activists and African-Americans.

The FBI report noted that between 1970 and 1984, the Black Liberation Army was involved in at least 38 criminal incidents, including 26 armed assaults, three assassinations, four bombings, and four hijackings and hostage-takings — half of them targeting law enforcement officers. But it made no reference to law enforcement violence against black activists, including the 1985 bombing of the Philadelphia headquarters of black liberation group MOVE, that killed 11 people.

Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee in November 2017, Wray called COINTELPRO “one of the darker moments in FBI’s history.” “It’s something we are not proud of, but it’s also something we have learned from,” he said. But when Rep. Cedric Richmond asked him why the FBI’s building continued to be named after J. Edgar Hoover — COINTELPRO’s infamous architect — Wray replied, “Like most people, he’s complicated.”

The “black identity extremism” report was hardly the first FBI effort to revive the tactics of COINTELPRO. In 2012, German, then at the American Civil Liberties Union, obtained public records revealing that the FBI had come up with yet another label to target what they claimed was a growing threat: “black separatist” domestic terrorism. Then, as now, the more recent violence driven by black nationalist ideology dated back decades, but the FBI included new warnings in its terrorism training materials that inexplicably connected the growing size of the black population in states like Georgia with a growing domestic terror threat. (As the ACLU noted at the time, the FBI had around the same time also invented what it called “American Islamic Extremists.”)

“The government has always kept an eye on black people because they want to keep us in a certain social order.”

“You would hope that a law enforcement agency learns from its past mistakes,” said German. “I think that’s where the biggest failure is, that there are enough parallels to how the FBI reacted to protests in the 1960s and 1970s that should have dissuaded them from adopting similar approaches again.”

But rather than learning from the past, it seems that the FBI is trying to maintain its old ways under a different name. While the ideologies that the terms “black separatism” and “black identity extremism” purport to represent would appear rather different, the FBI has recently folded both into the latter category, documents reveal. In an internal email exchange obtained by Property of the People and shared with The Intercept, Michael F. Paul, an official with the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, wrote to colleagues that the bureau had updated its definition of “black separatist extremism” in order “to broaden it beyond simply those seeking ‘separatism,’” he wrote. “The threat or movement has simply evolved,” Paul added, “and many are seeking more than/other than separation.”

Shapiro, of Property of the People, said the reclassification aimed to cast an even wider net on black activists at a time when police accountability, rather than separatism, was their priority. “Black Lives Matter isn’t a separatist movement, and the FBI wanted to expand its surveillance of black activists and communities,” he told The Intercept.

“With ‘black identity extremism,’ the FBI has expanded its ‘black separatist extremist’ category to also designate groups like Black Lives Matter a security threat,” he added. “The ‘BIE’ classification is the FBI’s bureaucratic umbrella for targeting as terrorists black people who expose the daily terror against their families and neighborhoods perpetrated by unaccountable killers in blue.”

To many black activists, that’s a familiar story.

“The government has always kept an eye on black people because they want to keep us in a certain social order,” said Omowale, of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. “The term ‘black identity extremist’ may be a new term, but the way that the government operates is nothing new. They’ve been doing it since we’ve been in this country, since black people, even slaves, tried to organize for some type of freedom.”

The post The Strange Tale of the FBI’s Fictional “Black Identity Extremism” Movement appeared first on The Intercept.

Most of these laws were created in response to the 9/11 attacks. In all, 27 states passed anti-terrorism legislation in 2002.

In some states, terrorism is vaguely defined. Arkansas outlaws “terroristic acts” but does not say that such acts must be ideologically motivated, a requirement under the federal terrorism law. Maine prohibits what lawmakers term a “catastrophe” of “terroristic intent,” which can include releasing a chemical or biological toxin or causing an explosion, fire, flood, building collapse, or even an avalanche.

Since 9/11, state lawmakers have continued to be reactionary in drafting and amending anti-terrorism laws. Georgia created a law in 2017 to define “domestic terrorism” following Dylann Roof’s mass shooting at a black church in South Carolina. After Omar Mateen’s massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, lawmakers amended the state’s 2002 anti-terrorism law to strengthen criminal penalties for acts of terrorism, adding a life sentence for terrorists whose violence results in death, among other changes. Kentucky and Michigan provide even harsher penalties: life in prison for anyone convicted of committing an act of terrorism.

Here’s a look at anti-terrorism laws in the 50 states and the District of Columbia:

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures, Justia

The post How Individual States Have Criminalized Terrorism appeared first on The Intercept.