Julia Ioffe: Trump's Antifa Terror

[Nevilledog]

https://puck.news/trump-moves-to-elevate-antifa-as-a-top-terror-threat/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/cBfVH

Since 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community has relied on the National Intelligence Priorities Framework to determine where its constituent agencies focus their attention and resources. The classified document tells the C.I.A. which organizations to infiltrate, the N.S.A. which signals intelligence to intercept, and the National Reconnaissance Office where to point its spy satellites. It’s historically included targets like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. But in recent months, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the conversations, the Trump administration has been working to add a new top counterterrorism priority to the NIPF: antifa.

This has been a dramatic and alarming development for many counterterrorism veterans, especially given that “antifa” is not a coherent organization like Al Qaeda. The term has become a sort of MAGA catch-all for left-wing protesters—including domestically, where collecting intelligence on citizens is subject to a much stricter standard. The effort to shift focus to antifa has raised concerns among current and former counterterrorism officials that the administration aims to turn an intelligence apparatus built to combat foreign threats against domestic political opponents. “They’re putting antifa on the list and bumping them up in the queue in a way that doesn’t correspond to threats,” one national security official told me. A recently retired counterterrorism official who was involved in the discussions confirmed this, saying, “The view from on high was that we had been ignoring this very dangerous threat and we needed to devote resources to confirm that.” An administration official told me “it’s true” that the process of adding antifa to the NIPF has begun. (The State Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions in time for publication.)

Antifa has never been part of the NIPF before—and for good reason. The term, short for “anti-fascist,” has its origins in the (woefully unsuccessful) German and Italian anti-fascist movements of the early 1930s. These days, it is a vague and mutable ideology, encompassing a broad range of far-left ideas—anarchism, communism, anti-capitalism—with no unified belief set. More importantly in the counterterrorism context, it’s not an actual organization with leaders, a command structure, or financing sources that can be targeted. What it is, however, is a central obsession of the second Trump administration.

This tension was on stark display in December, when Michael Glasheen, the F.B.I.’s operations director for national security, testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee that antifa is the bureau’s “primary concern right now” and “the most immediate, violent threat” domestically. But when questioned by Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s top Democrat, about the location of antifa’s headquarters or how many members it has, Glasheen was visibly flummoxed and could not answer.

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