The Trump administration is embarking on an expansive effort to root out what it sees as rampant left-wing domestic terrorism, raising concerns among some security experts and lawmakers that broad categories of Americans’ political speech could come under surveillance.
Thursday marks a first deadline, set earlier this month in a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi, for all federal law-enforcement agencies to “coordinate delivery” of their intelligence files on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities to the FBI. Bondi has tasked the agency with using those files to draw up lists of Americans and foreigners to investigate as part of a campaign directed by President Donald Trump against what his administration views as a growing threat of political violence by the American left.
“Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “The Trump Administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities.”
Critics warn that the plan signals an impending crackdown on political dissent under the banner of counterterrorism — one that could land large numbers of liberal activists on government watch lists and chill Americans’ First Amendment right to protest the administration’s policies.
Bondi’s Dec. 4 memorandum, which was first reported by journalist Ken Klippenstein and later confirmed by the Justice Department to The Washington Post, listed “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” “radical gender ideology,” and “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality” as some of the political agendas espoused by the individuals who might merit investigation.
The memo says the government will pursue people “with a willingness to use violence against law-abiding citizenry to serve those beliefs,” making no mention of violent extremism animated by right-wing or other viewpoints. Citing the phrase “Hey Fascist! Catch!” inscribed on a bullet casing of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Bondi wrote: “Violence against what extremists claim to be fascism is the clarion call of recent domestic terrorism.”
On Monday, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles credited the administration’s new focus on left-wing crime for the arrest and charging of four alleged members of the leftist Turtle Island Liberation Front, who prosecutors say were plotting to bomb multiple L.A. locations on New Year’s Eve.
This year is the first in a decade in which left-wing violent extremism outpaced right-wing violent extremism, according to one recent study, in part because the latter has plummeted since Trump’s reelection. The Trump administration has broadly attributed violent clashes between protesters and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to left-wing activity, as it has Kirk’s fatal shooting in September, though his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, had no strong or consistent political allegiance, according to his gaming partners and other acquaintances.
Trump blamed “Radical Left Democrats” for inspiring a September shooting attack outside a Dallas ICE facility that killed two detained migrants. The shooter, Joshua Jahn, called ICE employees “people showing up to collect a dirty paycheck” but appeared to have acted alone before killing himself, according to the acting U.S. attorney in Dallas.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is one of a number of administration figures who have moved into government housing in the wake of what he called “terroristic threats.” Miller hailed the administration’s approach in an X post Monday, saying “vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States.”
The federal government has broad powers to surveil individuals and groups for terrorism investigations, especially since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The FBI and its partner agencies have many commercial tools, from facial recognition software to license plate and mobile phone location tracking databases to drones that record high-definition video. They are also able to conduct wiretaps, hack into phones remotely and conduct undercover investigations with approval.
Government agencies are sharing more data with each other than in years past. The Post has reported that more IRS information has been made available to immigration authorities, though that has been challenged in court, and DHS has sought information from health and transport agencies as well.
Bondi’s memo, which implements a strategy laid out by the president in September, has drawn strong criticism from some scholars, lawmakers and former officials. They say it gives the Justice Department a broad remit to surveil and interrogate progressive political activists, anti-ICE protesters, non-Christians, feminists, the LGBTQ community and others.
“It’s a pretty damn dangerous document,” said former FBI agent Michael Feinberg, who is now a senior editor at Lawfare, of Bondi’s memorandum. “It’s dangerous in the sense that it is directed at a specific ideology, namely the left, without offering much evidence as to why that is necessary. And it’s also dangerous in the sense that it’s ignoring the lion’s share of nihilistic violent extremists.” Such acts, which the FBI categorizes as being motivated not by political ideology but by a hatred for society at large, constituted a “large chunk” of current domestic terrorism investigations, FBI Director Kash Patel told a Senate committee in September.
“We are committed to working with the Justice Department and our state, local, federal, and tribal law enforcement partners to protect the homeland, while at the same time safeguarding constitutional rights,” the FBI said in a statement.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not convinced. “It is a throwback to McCarthyism and the worst abuses of Hoover’s FBI to use federal law enforcement against Americans purely because of their political beliefs or because they disagree with the current president’s politics,” he said in a statement to The Post.
Democratic administrations have faced blowback over First Amendment implications when they launched probes against right-wing extremist groups. Trump and some of his supporters had accused the Biden administrationof criminalizing free speech in their investigations into Trump supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Some of the statutes Bondi directed prosecutors to consider as they investigate extremists reflect the same charges leveled at many of the Jan. 6 rioters, including picketing and parading with intent to obstruct the administration of justice.
During the first Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security pulled back in 2011 from an ambitious intelligence-gathering plan on right-wing extremism after receiving criticism from Republicans that it was an ideological attack on the right.
Some experts suggest the guidelines laid out by Bondi will be tempered by longer-standing FBI procedures. The agency’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, most recently updated last year, calls for special care when core rights of expression are involved, such as in organized protests.
“Individuals or groups who communicate with each other or with members of the public in any form in pursuit of social or political causes — such as opposing war or foreign policy, protesting government actions … have a fundamental constitutional right to do so,” the guide says.
Conservative legal scholar John Yoo, who has supported some of Trump’s policies, said the approach could be appropriate if the FBI is careful. “Groups cannot use some First Amendment activity to claim a broad immunity from investigation that conceals potentially illegal activity,” Yoo told The Post. “Because the definition of an antifa organization may be unclear, the FBI should take extra pains to make sure it is not selecting targets because of their ideology.”
A former FBI counterterror expert and a person currently involved with government oversight of the intelligence agencies, both speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the memo appeared aimed at justifying the use against Americans of powerful tools now employed to combat foreign terrorism. There are far fewer limits on overseas spy powers, which U.S. agencies have used in the past to hack into foreign and American company operations abroad, capture mass internet traffic, and vacuum up all manner of financial, location and phone records.
“They are trying to find ways to say: ‘This American who is involved in American politics, do they have a foreign financial connection?’ And that’s enough to say they are a foreign operative, so especially if they leave the country, there’s much less oversight,” the former FBI counterterror expert said.
The Bondi memo does not grant law enforcement any new legal authorities, said Patrick G. Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the libertarian Cato Institute. What’s new is the order to marshal these existing surveillance powers on a broad scale against the administration’s political opponents, he said, rather than in a selective and politically neutral manner.
Bondi’s memorandum is meant to guide the actions of Joint Terrorism Task Forces that link local and state law enforcement with agents from the FBI, ICE and other federal agencies and pool their surveillance tools and resources.
The new campaign comes in the wake of accusations by civil liberty organizations that the Trump administration has already eroded traditional First Amendment freedoms this year by ordering militarized crackdowns on public protests, investigating dissenting former officials and left-wing political activists, and seeking to intimidate news outlets from reporting freely.
Joshua Aaron, the founder of ICEBlock, an app that allows users to crowdsource information about ongoing ICE operations, sued Bondi and other Trump administration officials earlier this month. Apple had removed ICEBlock from its App Store after pressure from the administration, which said the app endangered ICE agents.
“This administration violated our First Amendment rights, and they’re trying to chill free speech in this country, not just for me, but across its citizens,” Aaron said in an interview.
Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” on Sept. 25, a day after the fatal shooting at the Dallas ICE facility. The document ordered a whole-of-government movement helmed by the FBI to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence,” with a focus on “antifa,” which it declared to be a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Concerns that this campaign will result in overreach and be used selectively to target Trump’s political opponents stem in part from the hazy definition of “antifa.” Antifa is short for “anti-fascist” and is more of an ideology, not an organization with leadership and structure, according to a number of political scientists.
Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last week that he agreed with Trump that antifa was the nation’s largest domestic terrorism threat, but was unable to answer questions from lawmakers about how many members it had or where it was located. “We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen said.
Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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