The DOJ Has Always Had The Ability To Take Down Domestic Terrorists, Just Not The Desire
The FBI and DOJ have always felt comfortable going after Islamic extremists. That’s the sort of thing they like to do. They like it so much they’ll radicalize vulnerable people for the sole purpose of locking them up for multiple decades.
A lot of digital ink has been spilled covering the FBI’s success rate in taking down people its operatives and informants have converted into “terrorists.” While this does next to nothing to make the nation more secure, it allows the DOJ and FBI to tout its string of “wins” against people who neither had the mental capacity, funds, or actual desire to do harm to American citizens in the name of Islam.
Going after domestic terrorists is a different story. White nationalists, far right extremists, and actual Nazis have always seemed a bit more difficult to take down. But that’s not because the government doesn’t have the power, tools, or expertise to do it. It’s because going after domestic extremists means going after people who have joined groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. A Venn diagram of these extremist groups and law enforcement officers would contain a disturbingly large overlap.
Never has that been more apparent than following the January 6th insurrection. Far too many law enforcement officers engaged in lawbreaking on that day, joining a mob that gleefully assaulted many of their fellow officers who were asked (belatedly) to defend the Capitol from Trump supporters who wished to return their cult leader to office via violence, threats, and intimidation.
But now the DOJ is actually trying to dismantle domestic extremist groups with plenty of American members. This report by Ali Winston for Wired details the federal indictment of two members of a far-right extremist group Terrorgram Collective — a neo-Nazi network that is cross-pollinated by long-known Nazi groups like Atomwaffen.
On Monday, United States prosecutors in Sacramento unveiled a 15-count indictment accusing Dallas Erin Humber, 34, and Matthew Robert Allison, 37, of serving as core members of a virulent neo-Nazi propaganda network that solicited attacks on federal officials, power infrastructure, people of color, and material support for acts of terrorism both within the US and overseas.
The group, known as the Terrorgram Collective, has produced four publications to date—a blend of ideological motivation, mass murder worship, neo-fascist indoctrination, and how-to manuals for chemical weapons attacks, infrastructure sabotage, and ethnic cleansing. The screeds have directly inspired a series of ideologically motivated attacks around the world, including a 2022 mass shooting at an LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia; successful attacks on power infrastructure in North Carolina, similar failed plots in Baltimore and New Jersey; and a stabbing spree in the Turkish city of Eskişehir.
The group considers people like Oklahoma federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh and Norwegian mass murder Anders Brevik among its patron saints. It is dedicated into turning the United States into a neo-Nazi paradise through violent means. And it has largely been left alone in past years because the DOJ apparently didn’t feel going after domestic terrorists with white skin would be as politically expedient or publicly popular as going after people with browner skin and non-Christian religious affiliations. On top of that, the FBI has plenty of agents and employees who are more loyal to a former president than their own oaths of office.
The official excuse — at least as it’s presented in court documents — is that the UK government has finally given the United States the leverage it needs to prosecute its own home-grown terrorists. But that’s just a convenient excuse for years of inaction, as one former FBI agent points out.
Relying on the UK government’s April order declaring the Terrorgram Collective a banned terrorist group and a little-employed section of the “material support for terrorism” section of the US criminal code, federal prosecutors are finally taking an aggressive, whole-of-law approach to violent neo-fascist extremism.
“What it shows is exactly what I’ve been arguing for years:, All the tools they need to do this work, they have,” says Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a liberty and national security fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, an NYU School of Law nonprofit. German points to years of arguments by the FBI and Department of Justice that they are hamstrung by existing laws when it comes to tackling violent extremists within the United States. “It also reveals the false separation that the government makes about international and domestic terrorism—white supremacy has always been transnational.”
Pretending this is a recent development is ridiculous. Domestic white nationalists and neo-Nazis have always been guided by and communicated with foreign groups with the same twisted ideals. What this clearly demonstrates is that previous DOJ officials and presidential administrations have been reluctant to go after these terrorists because they’re white, they vote, and far too often, the groups contain members of US law enforcement.
Now, the mask is off, so to speak. The government has the power to tackle domestic extremists who are willing to commit violence against their fellow Americans to further their white-makes-right goals. Of course, the new problem is the old problem: this new form of equality (I guess?) basically doubles the chances more people (and not just the brown ones!) will become victims of the entrapment the FBI likes to call “counter-terrorism.”