Democrats Cook the FBI’s Books on Domestic Terrorism
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 19, 2023 12:29 PM
The projection of dystopian America mired in a terrorist war waged by the Democrats’ political adversaries is false.
Even before the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, congressional Democrats had formulated a plan to project the illusion that the most perilous threat to American national security — not just in our time but in our history — was domestic terrorism fueled by white supremacists. This was, and remains, a political narrative through and through. Democrats are not even subtle in signaling to the public that they should think of Trump supporters — not just the unabashed MAGA faction but any of the over 70 million Americans who found Trump preferable to Democrats — as white supremacists, or at least sympathizers of white supremacists, and ergo abettors of domestic terrorism.
I laid this plan bare in January 2021. Again, even before the Capitol riot, House Democrats were proposing their so-called “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.” They haven’t gotten it enacted yet, but they’re trying hard, calculating that they can demagogue the Republicans they need to get it across the finish line by masquerading their political project as pro–law enforcement and pro–national security. And, of course, by inveighing that anyone who opposes the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act must necessarily be in favor of domestic terrorism, right? That’s why House Democrats, while they had a slim majority, reintroduced and passed the legislation in 2022. That’s why, just a few days ago, Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, rolled out his symmetrical version in the Judiciary Committee.
The objective of this proposal is not to improve national security. As I explained in 2021, and as NR later editorialized, if that were the aim, Democrats would not engage in the subterfuge of attempting to change federal law’s perfectly serviceable definition of domestic terrorism — for the purpose of insulating jihadists and left-wing radicals while targeting their phantom white supremacists (i.e., Republicans, pro-life activists, parents who object to woke-progressive indoctrination in the schools, et al.).
The real purpose of this legislation is twofold: (1) stigmatize as terrorism policies that progressives oppose; (2) establish in law requirements that induce the FBI and other federal agencies to inflate the number of domestic-terrorism investigations, the better to insist that — though you’d never know it given the absence of, you know, actual terrorist attacks — the country is under a white-supremacist siege.
Exposing this demagogic scheme is an important purpose of House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. As our Brittany Bernstein has reported, that subcommittee held a hearing on Thursday at which three FBI agents testified as whistleblowers, relating both how the bureau has been politicized into serving this Democratic political gambit, and how they have been retaliated against for reporting the situation to Congress.
Brittany noted that Thursday’s hearing focused, in part, on testimony from Agent Steve Friend, a twelve-year veteran and SWAT-team member, who has detailed how the FBI labors to inflate the number of terrorism cases and uses SWAT resources unnecessarily in arrest scenarios to create the impression that it is apprehending dangerous terrorists:
Friend said the FBI’s handling of the January 6 Capitol riot-related investigations “deviated from standard practice and created a false impression with respect to the threat of DVE [i.e., domestic violent extremism] nationwide.”. . . He testified that the FBI is in need of reform in several areas: “the integrated program management system incentivizes the use of inappropriate investigatory processes and tools to achieve arbitrary statistical accomplishments” and there is “mission creep within the national security branch [that] has refocused counterterrorism from legitimate foreign actors to political opponents within our borders. . . . The FBI weaponizes process crimes and reinterprets laws to initiate pretextual prosecutions and persecute its political enemies[.]”
Jordan’s report excerpts portions of a subcommittee interview with Friend, in which he explains that the bureau is deviating from its normal case-opening and accounting practices in order to make it appear that there are more domestic-terrorism cases and that the suspected terrorists are making mayhem throughout the country. As you’d expect, these shenanigans are woven out of the events of January 6.
That should tell you much of what you need to know. The operating premise of congressional Democrats, the Biden administration, and — therefore — the FBI is that the Capitol riot was a terrorist attack. That is absurd, for reasons I explicated when Attorney General Merrick Garland, putting his office in the service of this narrative, preposterously claimed that the Capitol riot was the most dangerous threat to American democracy he had ever seen.
As a Clinton Justice Department official, Garland supervised the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — a terrorist attack in which a U.S. courthouse was destroyed, 168 people were murdered, and another 759 people were wounded. The Capitol riot was nothing like that, just like it was not like that era’s other jihadist attacks and plots — the World Trade Center bombing, the (unsuccessful) plot to bomb New York City landmarks, the “Bojinka” plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky (in which a tourist was killed and a plane nearly downed in a dry-run explosion), the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (destroying buildings and killing 224 people), the Khobar Towers bombing (destroying a building and killing 19 U.S. Air Force members), the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole (killing 17 U.S. Navy members and nearly sinking a destroyer), and the 9/11 atrocities (killing nearly 3,000 Americans, annihilating the World Trade Center, badly damaging the Pentagon, and resulting in a missile-like explosion when Flight 93 crash-landed in Shanksville, Pa.).
What happened at the Capitol on January 6 was a protest that turned violent, devolving into a riot. But no one tried to destroy the Capitol (it sustained property damage that was trivial compared with the destructive force of a terrorist attack). No police and other security personnel were killed (though over a hundred were assaulted and some sustained serious injuries; three rioters died, two of natural causes trigged by the frenzy, one killed by a Capitol police officer). The worst of the violence was over quickly, the Capitol was cleared in a few hours, and so little damage was done — compared with a terrorist attack — that lawmakers were able to reconvene in the Capitol that evening.
It does not diminish the egregiousness of a riot to observe the incontestable fact that it was not an act of domestic terrorism — just like a murder, horrible as it is, is not a terrorist attack. And bad as the Capitol riot was, it did not approach in duration or lethality the radical left-wing rioting that beset this country for months after George Floyd’s death in police custody — rioting that Democrats take pain to exclude from their “domestic terrorism” bookkeeping because, sympathetic to the radicals’ ends, progressives turn a blind eye to their means.
But not January 6. You’re to see that not as a riot, but as domestic terrorism.
From that premise, the FBI’s books are being cooked to make its one “terrorism” case, based on an uprising in one place at one time (over a few hours), look as if it were over a thousand terrorism cases, posing persistent peril all over the country. To understand how, you need to know how the bureau usually works.
Routinely, the FBI field office in the place where the crime mainly happened (which is in the federal district where the case will be prosecuted) heads up the investigation. If the crime involves interstate activity, or if relevant participants or witnesses need to be pursued in other parts of the country, the field office whose agents are running the case sends out investigative “leads” to other field offices. Those field offices elsewhere in the country pursue these leads, which could just be interviewing a witness or could be something more serious like executing a search or arrest warrant. The fruits of those leads are then transmitted to the field office running the case.
To take an example, from 1993 through 1996, when I ran the prosecution of the Blind Sheikh’s jihadist cell – an actual terrorism case – the FBI’s New York field office was responsible for the investigation. Over those years, it sent out hundreds of leads to FBI offices throughout the country (and other parts of the world) to support the case, but it was still just one case, in Manhattan, with lots of leads returnable to the FBI in New York.
That is not what has happened with the Capitol riot. The FBI’s Washington Field Office is running the investigation, but instead of sending out leads, it often sends out directions to other field offices to open new cases in the places where subjects of the Capitol riot reside (and note that the Justice Department has prosecuted over 1,000 people from nearly all 50 states in connection with January 6).
As Agent Friend told Jordan:
The manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics. Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single, black swan incident at the Capitol, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.
He adds:
By opening a separate case for each individual as opposed to one case with however many subjects are involved, they’ve turned one case into a thousand cases. And by spreading them to the field they’ve given the impression that those domestic terror cases are around the country when, in fact, the subjects, if they committed any sort of violation or infraction, they committed a crime at the Capitol on one day as opposed to being a cell that’s operating in El Paso or Cleveland.
Of course, it’s not just turning one case into a thousand cases, but into a thousand terrorism cases. As another whistleblower, Agent Garret O’Boyle explains, the FBI classified “every single January 6 case . . . as a domestic terrorism case,” even though many of these cases involve “petty crimes” — misdemeanors such as trespassing and disorderly conduct.
The effect? The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy crunches the numbers:
The bureau and the DHS revealed the FBI was conducting approximately 1,400 pending domestic terrorism investigations as of the end of fiscal 2020, and that jumped to roughly 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations by the end of fiscal 2021. The U.S. government report said the FBI arrested approximately 180 domestic terrorism subjects in 2020, while it arrested roughly 800 such subjects in 2021. The FBI and DHS said that “a significant portion” of the 2021 investigations “were directly related to the unlawful activities during the January 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol.”
Thus, Matt Olson, the chief of the Biden Justice Department’s National Security Division, in his best “sky is falling” voice, has told Jordan’s committee that “the number of FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremism has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.” Yes, I’m sure you’ve noticed the mass-murderous explosions all over the country, right? Well, no . . . Olson concedes that a “that number does include the Jan. 6 cases,” and that while “not all of them are characterized as violent extremists . . . many are, and those do account for at least a significant portion of that jump over the past two years in the number of investigations.”
You don’t say?
The FBI is doing what Democrats have been demanding, what they’ve been trying — now, with a push from Durbin and Senate Democrats — to codify into statutory law: manufacture the perception that the country is enveloped by white-supremacist domestic terrorists.
Remember when, on October 4, 2021, Garland issued his outrageous memo directing the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices throughout America to harass parents who dared to protest the conversion of schools into laboratories of woke-progressivism? It turned out that Garland was acting at the urging of the Biden White House, which had collaborated with progressive activists and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to craft a letter that described the parents as “domestic terrorists.” They were falsely ginning up threat incidents, many of which were exaggerated or fabricated, but which Garland would have the FBI and federal prosecutors investigate as potential terrorist activity occurring nationwide.
At the time, Jordan became alarmed that, based on Garland’s directive, the FBI had developed domestic-terrorism “threat tags” for these cases. Jordan feared the threat tags meant the bureau was using the Patriot Act and other counterterrorism authorities to monitor protesting parents. Well, they may try to do that ultimately, but as I pointed out at the time, the immediate purpose of the threat tag was to brand these investigations of local dust-ups as a dire nationwide threat, fit for a full-court press by federal, state, and local law enforcement:
Purporting to act pursuant to Garland’s October 4 memo, these top officials instructed FBI personnel that the bureau would henceforth use a new “threat tag” created by the two divisions. The “threat tag” is to be applied to all “investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” Its purpose is to “scope this threat on a national level and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels.”
Creating an illusion of a domestic-terrorism siege by overhauling the way federal agencies account for investigations has always been the point of the Democrats’ push for Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act legislation. To repeat what I said in early 2021:
The Democrats’ new proposal . . . would target domestic terrorism in an unprecedented way. There would be no new domestic terrorism crimes, at least not yet; but there would be a new concentration on investigating, arresting, and prosecuting domestic terrorists. Just not all domestic terrorists. In fact, just a very specific breed of domestic terrorist: white supremacists and neo-Nazis — i.e., what Democrats consider to be right-wing terrorism or, more specifically, Trump-inspired insurrectionists in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot.
The proposed legislation would require domestic terrorism units to be created in the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI, in addition to a new “Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee” made up of high-ranking federal law-enforcement officials. Besides staffing up, these agencies would be required to file semi-annual reports for the next decade, outlining the extent of the domestic terrorist threat and the efforts they are making to combat it — how many investigations, arrests, indictments, etc. There would also be a mandate to establish “Training to Combat Domestic Terrorism” so that the feds could instruct state, local, and tribal law-enforcement in how to detect domestic terrorists, keep them from infiltrating police forces, and prosecute them.
But again, Democrats are not interested in combating all domestic terrorism. Not only have they effectively excluded from coverage American-based jihadists who are associated with or inspired by foreign terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. The new proposal, again and again, is explicit in focusing on “white supremacists and neo-Nazis.”
The required reports, for example, would have to “include an assessment of the domestic terrorism threat posed by White supremacists and neo-Nazis, including White supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies.” They would itemize “any White-supremacist-related incidents or attempted incidents” that have occurred since April 19, 1995.
Why that date? Because that’s the date of the aforementioned Oklahoma City bombing. In Democrat lore, served up by the house organ itself, the New York Times, Timothy McVeigh was inspired to bomb the federal courthouse by The Turner Diaries. That’s a novel in which a group of white-supremacists attacks . . . yes . . . the Capitol, in their racist zeal to overthrow the government. Democrats would have us instructed, by writing into law, that there is a straight line from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Capitol riot — a line reflective of an existential threat that has thrummed through the United States for decades, with imminent terrorist attacks now a clear and present danger all over the country.
This is nonsense, of course. There are ideologically driven militants of many stripes. Undoubtedly, there is a smattering of white-supremacism among the -isms, but to suggest that they are ubiquitous and on the rampage — or, indeed, that they are more numerous and dangerous than radical leftists (e.g., Antifa and Black Lives Matter) and jihadists — is delusional.
The projection of dystopian America mired in a terrorist war waged by the Democrats’ political adversaries is false. Since it doesn’t exist in reality, congressional Democrats and the Biden administration are trying to create it by FBI bookkeeping. As we’ve seen over the last eight years, and again this week with the release of the Durham Report, when Democrats say jump, the FBI says, “How high?
