Post by the Scribe on Sept 2, 2020 1:23:25 GMT
They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them.
www.yahoo.com/news/tried-trump-care-wing-terrorism-083050274.html
Betsy Woodruff Swan
PoliticoAugust 26, 2020, 1:30 AM MST
Elizabeth Neumann spent March 13 and 14 of 2019 at a conference in the picturesque Spanish port city of Málaga. The topic: terrorism. Western leaders were deeply worried about the dangers foreign terrorist fighters traveling back from places like Iraq, Libya and Syria would pose to their home countries. And that’s what Neumann expected to dominate the two-day event.
Neumann was DHS’s assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the time, handling counterterrorism work from the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. In Málaga, a history-drenched resort town on Spain’s Costa del Sol that once marked the fault line between the Muslim and Christian worlds, she and her counterparts from scores of countries spent long hours talking about the terrorism threats that concerned them most. After a while, she began to see a pattern: Though concerns about instability in the Middle East dominated most public discussions on counterterrorism, about 80 percent of the leaders at the conference ranked far-right extremism among their top concerns.
The next morning, when Neumann woke up early to catch a cab to the airport, her phone started lighting up with news alerts. A gunman had murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Prosecutors would later say the killer planned the attack to maximize casualties and terrify the Muslim community and non-European immigrants. Five months later, an American terrorist would cite him as an inspiration.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh — it’s happening now,’” Neumann recalled in an interview.
For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem.
This story is based on background and on-record interviews with current and former law enforcement officials, inside and outside DHS. It includes, for the first time, detailed comments from two top former political appointees in the department who tried to tackle the problem before giving up on the Trump administration. Frustrated by the president’s failure to act, they are actively supporting his opponent.
“At least in this administration,” Neumann said, “there’s not going to be anything substantive done on domestic terrorism.”
‘People were excited’
The Department of Homeland Security is one of the federal government’s biggest, newest and unhappiest departments. It was created amid the ashes of the Sept. 11 terror attacks as part of the government’s efforts to — as its name suggests — secure the U.S. homeland. It became something of the Island of Lost Agencies, holding everything from the Secret Service to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Coast Guard under its massive umbrella. Only the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have more employees. And the 230,000 employees at DHS consistently report miserable morale.
In the agency’s misery, Donald Trump saw opportunity. During the 2016 campaign, he touted the support of unions representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents. And after his inauguration, DHS was one of his first stops. He gave a major speech at its sprawling headquarters in northwest D.C. just five days into his administration, highlighting his focus on the department’s immigration and border security missions.
“It was hot as hell in the gym because there were so many people,” a former DHS official recalled. “People were excited. There was a moment of, DHS isn’t going to be the last on the list.”
But being at the top of Trump’s list also brought immense challenges for DHS leaders: namely, trying to amp up immigration enforcement enough to keep the White House happy while also managing the department’s panoply of other missions.
Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.
“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”
On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.
Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t.
“Sadly, the president botched his response, and it became much more about what the president said and how he botched it than it was about what just happened,” Neumann lamented. “This is not the America we know. We all had this collective, ‘What in the world? How is this happening in 2017?’”
John Kelly, a gruff four-star general, was leading the department at the time. Three months later, and just six months into his presidency, Trump fired Reince Priebus as chief of staff and replaced him with Kelly. Elaine Duke, then the department’s second-in-command, stepped in as acting DHS chief for a few months, and then the Senate confirmed Kirstjen Nielsen. As the senior leadership merry-go-round played out, the president’s demands for more deportations and fewer illegal border crossings stayed as high as ever.
Trump often expressed irritation when he saw the DHS secretary anywhere other than the border. Miles Taylor, who was Nielsen’s chief of staff, told POLITICO Trump used to lambaste her if she didn’t physically spend enough of her time there.
“Verbatim the president said, ‘Get your ass to the border, why are you not down there?’” Taylor said.
Another former DHS official, who requested anonymity to discuss the president’s comments, said Trump once fumed when he learned Nielsen was in Europe working on cybersecurity issues — even though cybersecurity is one of DHS’s many core missions.
“Why isn’t she on the border?” the official recalled Trump saying.
Senior DHS officials said they dealt with two constants from the White House: constant pressure to deliver on immigration, and constant chaos.
“When you are spending all of your energy preventing him from doing something illegal, you can’t then also run your State Department or your Defense Department or your DHS,” Neumann said, highlighting the challenges Trump presented to Cabinet secretaries. “So you’re heavily relying on the people underneath you: ‘Try to do your jobs as well as possible while we protect you from the chaos.’ But everyone in the system is experiencing the same thing.”
For instance, the Senate-confirmed general counsel for DHS, John Mitnick, reportedly warned the White House in February 2019 that a proposal to release undocumented immigrants into so-called sanctuary cities could get DHS sued for due process violations.
In a 2019 town hall meeting with a group of DHS lawyers, according to a source present, one attendee asked Mitnick what his biggest challenge was. His answer: finding time to work on anything other than immigration and border security. During the same event, Mitnick told attendees that they should inform their supervisors immediately if anyone ever pressured them to greenlight an illegal action or policy, and he promised to support them. Later that year, Mitnick was fired.
‘Bullshit’
Early in Nielsen’s tenure as secretary, she and Taylor discussed the domestic terror threat at length. In the months before her confirmation, a far-right extremist named Jeremy Christian had murdered two men on a train after harassing two Black teenage girls. One of the girls wore a hijab, according to news reports, and Christian yelled “fuck Muslims” at them. Just days after Nielsen was confirmed, a man with a swastika marking on his leg murdered two students at a high school in New Mexico before killing himself.
“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”
At the time, then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster was overseeing the drafting of a new national counterterrorism strategy. The document would lay out priorities for using resources from across the U.S. government to combat terrorism.
Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. Four months after Nielsen started as DHS secretary, Trump replaced McMaster with John Bolton. The process of drafting the counterterrorism strategy continued under Bolton’s leadership.
“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism.”
Nielsen wasn’t happy, according to Taylor.
“She was like, ‘What gives?’” Taylor said. “He was like, ‘We’re doing more drafts, we’re doing more turns on it, just stay tuned, we’ll work on this. And she said, ‘It’s very important to me that we emphasize domestic terrorism here. This has got to be an administration priority.’”
The final document, released on Oct. 4, 2018, contained just two short paragraphs on domestic terrorism. One noted that the U.S. faced internal threats from “racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.” A second promised that the government would “investigate ties between domestic terrorists not motivated by radical Islamist ideologies and their overseas counterparts to more fully understand them.”
It was brief.
“They said, ‘We’ll come up with a separate domestic terrorism strategy,” Taylor said. “Bullshit. They never did. It just got lost.”
Bolton declined to comment on this reporting. Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, said the Trump administration takes the domestic terrorism threat seriously.
“Our country is constantly facing dynamic threats ranging from domestic, to cyber, to international, to financial crimes,” she said in a statement to POLITICO. “Our brave federal law enforcement, national security, and Intelligence officials work around the clock to monitor every range of threats facing our nation, including domestic terror. This sounds more like a case of Miles Taylor being ineffective at his job, than an indictment of the brave men and women in security officials [sic], FBI, and federal law enforcement who work every day to protect our country from threats foreign and domestic.”
Three weeks after the strategy’s release on Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman named Robert Bowers murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Before the massacre, he posted a message on the social networking site Gab about a Jewish nonprofit that helps refugees settle in the U.S.
“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”
‘We’re just going to focus on the solutions’
From her perch at DHS, meanwhile, Neumann pushed for the department to do more to prevent domestic terror attacks — a concept national security hands refer to as “left of boom,” as in, before an explosion hits.
The FBI is the lead law enforcement agency for investigating domestic terror. But DHS’s close work with state and local law enforcement agencies around the country — as well as private sector and community partners — means it can also play a role. For instance, advisers from DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency provided a security training that Tree of Life members participated in before the shooting. A top CISA official later told Congress that members of the synagogue said that training saved lives.
So starting in February 2019, Neumann pushed to get new funding for the new Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention. And in May 2019, Neumann said, acting DHS head Kevin McAleenan made a series of phone calls to the Hill ringing alarm bells that DHS’s work on domestic terrorism was severely underfunded and urging members to fund the effort. After an extensive effort that initially circumvented the White House budgeting process, Congress gave DHS $17 million in new funding for the office and for grants.
The concept was to have DHS help state, local, and nongovernment leaders work in their communities to prevent and reverse violent extremism. Neumann compared it with the role DHS plays in firefighting: The department doesn’t send personnel with hoses and helicopters to put out wildfires. But it does help set standards, provide training and send out grant money. The goal — both when it comes to firefighting and to domestic terrorism — is to help communities protect themselves. It grew out of the Obama-era Office of Community Partnerships. That office had focused on helping communities counter violent extremism, and the Trump team had frozen its funding in the early days after the election to review its efforts.
George Selim, who oversees the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism and was the first director of the Office of Community Partnerships, said the Trump administration let the office stagnate.
“You can’t snap your fingers and create an office in a Cabinet-level agency,” he said. “The previous administration did all the work, found the director, hired a career staff, got a budget, got a home, gave it legal authority, went out and got grant money for it. And then the Trump administration comes in and effectively does nothing with it, and it stagnates for two years plus, three years almost.”
Taylor said the White House wasn’t initially all that interested in DHS’s efforts to turn the old office into a new one focused on terrorism and targeted violence.
“We were pushing the White House: ‘Make this a priority, talk about this, fight for money on Capitol Hill for this,’” he said. “It was on deaf ears. You could not have seen a White House less interested in this.”
Neumann said she wished DHS and the White House had both moved faster. There were National Security Council staff who wanted to strengthen the administration’s response to the growing threat, she said. But the dizzying cycle of leadership changes in the upper echelons of Trump’s national security team didn’t make it easy.
“There was no NSC structure that was systematically working on issues like that,” she said. “It’s not to say that they weren’t doing things; it’s just that when you have chaos all around you, it’s really hard to do process stuff.”
On Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He told investigators that he liked the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to The Wall Street Journal, and posted a manifesto of his own saying he wanted to kill as many Hispanics as he could.
On Aug. 4, a gunman killed nine people at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier this month, per CNN, the FBI said its investigation into the killer’s motives is ongoing.
After the weekend of massacres, White House officials became more interested in Neumann’s project. Officials told her they could point to her work to show they took the problem seriously. She briefed multiple officials on domestic terrorism issues and what the government could do to prevent attacks. One challenge was particularly thorny, however: The officials, who Neumann declined to name, didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism.”
“They very clearly were looking at it through the lens of, ‘We have a violence problem,’” Neumann recalled. “And they did not want to talk about the ideological threat.”
“It makes me sad that in every other circumstance where you’re trying to lay out a strategy to go after a threat, you always start by articulating what the threat is,” she continued. “But in this particular case, we were told, ‘We’re just going to focus on the solutions.’”
Despite that tension, Trump’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal sought $80 million for DHS’s work to prevent domestic terrorism and targeted violence, along with an additional $20 million in grant money for DHS to disburse. The House greenlit that new funding. But it’s unlikely the bill will go anywhere in an election year.
A White House document touting the work was titled “Combating Targeted Violence.”
“At DHS, your budget is always in competition for [border] wall money,” Neumann said. “So it’s not insignificant to have gotten that support.”
“That’s the good news story,” she added.
Neumann’s successful efforts to shave a little money off the wall budget for domestic terrorism prevention have not won her fame and fortune. But the work isn’t unnoticed. Russ Travers, who helmed the National Counterterrorism Center until this March, put it this way: “I consider her a national patriot.”
The office is now working to hire regional coordinators and disburse grant money.
“Obviously, this is a very new undertaking for us,” said DHS’s current second-in-command, Ken Cuccinelli, in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s somewhat untested. But that’s OK. We’ll test it. We’ll see. The challenge for even that if we go down the road five years and look backwards, is going to be the eternal challenge of understanding what you prevented. Things that don’t happen are hard to measure. But that’s OK.”
The month after the El Paso and Dayton shootings, on Sept. 20, 2019, acting DHS Secretary McAleenan signed off on a strategic framework on terrorism and targeted violence. Neumann helmed the work drafting the document. McAleenan had previously ordered an immediate review of the department’s domestic terrorism efforts when he became its acting chief, and had tasked its Homeland Security Advisory Council with specifically looking into protecting houses of worship. He recognized domestic terror was a significant emerging threat and that the department needed to shift to respond to it, former DHS official Andrew Meehan said.
“White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” the McAleenan framework document read.
Chad Wolf.
The new strategic framework also promised that DHS would begin releasing a yearly State of the Homeland Threat Assessment document. Eleven months later, the first such briefing has yet to materialize.
Two months after releasing the document that discussed the white supremacist threat, McAleenan resigned from DHS. A new acting secretary, Chad Wolf, took his place. On Jan. 17, 2020, Wolf gave a speech that discussed McAleenan’s document and terror threats.
“We’re working aggressively to develop the implementation plan, which will be ready in the coming weeks,” he said.
No such plan is public.
John Cohen, the department’s former counterterrorism coordinator, said DHS could bring tremendous expertise and capabilities to the effort to fight domestic terror.
“The challenge is bringing those resources together in a cohesive, coordinated, and comprehensive way,” he added.
And, he said, the president isn’t making it easy.
“Law enforcement officials are concerned that the political rhetoric used by the president to inspire his political base has been viewed by some violent white supremacists as a call to violent action, and has been viewed by a number of mentally unwell, violence-prone individuals as permission to engage in acts of violence,” he added.
‘Interrogate the shit out of every single one of them’
By May 2020, the administration’s hesitancy to use the term “domestic terrorism” had evaporated — at least as far as actors from the left were concerned. After weeks of protests and property damage in Portland, Ore., President Trump tweeted that he would designate antifa, a loose agglomeration of left-wing ‘anti-fascist’ activists, as a terrorist organization — a legal impossibility. Attorney General William Barr then made a statement using the phrase that so many Trump administration officials have been loath to use.
“The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly,” he said.
Critics said it showed a new, broad enthusiasm to talk about domestic terrorism when the left could be blamed for it. Cuccinelli told POLITICO he rejects that criticism.
“I think it’s B.S.,” he said. “I think it’s people that want to downplay the work we’ve done in the white supremacy area. But let’s face it, what is in the news every day for the last three months? It is left-wing, organized violence.”
Cuccinelli also said the department sees white supremacist domestic terrorism as a serious threat.
“Obviously we’ve got white supremacist-type people we’ve got to deal with, and what we find with them is that you see smaller numbers, smaller groups, you don’t see large gatherings of them, but that when they act, the level of their lethality is higher,” he said.
Senior department officials have shown a significant interest in combating the left-wing violence Cuccinelli described, both publicly and privately. On a DHS leadership call in the early days of the department’s response, Mark Morgan––the often-bombastic and always outspoken acting head of Customs and Border Protection — showed particular appetite for an aggressive federal response.
“We ought to detain and interrogate the shit out of every single one of them,” he said, according to two administration officials familiar with the call.
It wasn’t clear who specifically Morgan was referring to. Asked about this comment, a CBP spokesperson declined to comment.
Earlier in his tenure as acting CBP chief, Morgan also concerned officials there by floating the idea of moving a key CBP counterterrorism office under the umbrella of its Office of Intelligence. The office in question, called the National Targeting Center, plays a major role in protecting aviation from terrorism. CBP’s Office of Intelligence, meanwhile, focuses on border security. According to two sources familiar with the matter, CBP officials worried that Morgan’s interest in moving the NTC pointed to an effort to move resources away from counterterrorism and toward border security. A CBP spokesperson also declined to comment on this reporting.
One state law enforcement official, who requested anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the intelligence products DHS sends to its state and local partners emphasize the threat from left-wing extremists significantly more than the threat from right-wing extremists––and disproportionately so. Left-wing extremists have caused numerous problems and hurt police, the state official continued. “But none of them have been killed,” the official said. “But when we look at the far right, we’ve seen numerous attacks where cops have been killed.”
“I would expect at least a balanced production between far left and far right extremists,” the official continued.
The official also said he got much more helpful information on threats from the far right from the Anti-Defamation League than from DHS — particularly its material on Boogaloo, a coterie of extremists trying to incite a race war.
“They only have a handful of analysts at the ADL, and their handful of analysts put together a better product that the entire DHS,” the official said.
Earlier in the Trump administration, DHS’s intelligence arm disbanded a group of analysts focused on domestic terrorism.
Selim, of the ADL, said DHS’s sparse material for state and local partners on far-right threats and Boogaloo was concerning.
“It’s problematic,” he said. “The DHS’s mission and mandate is to protect against all threats both foreign and domestic.”
‘The Deep State’
Neumann said she isn’t satisfied with the progress she made and has called for an independent commission to work on how the federal government can manage the domestic terror threat.
The tendency to downplay that threat has existed in prior administrations, she noted, but the Trump team has taken that tendency to an extreme. “Anything domestic-related is kind of seen as the JV of the national security team,” she said.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies — a centrist Washington think tank known for its focus on international affairs and defense technology — released a briefing in June of this year concluding that the most significant terror threat to the U.S. appears to come from white supremacists. Right-wing extremists were responsible for two-thirds of terror attacks and plots in the U.S. last year, it found, and for 90 percent in the first four months of 2020.
Neumann left the department in April. Last week, she endorsed Joe Biden for president. Taylor and Mitnick have endorsed Biden as well.
“The good news is, the people who have been given the charge to protect the country — even the career officials who folks think are the deep state — they passionately care about their jobs and are going to do whatever it takes to protect the country,” she said.
Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
www.yahoo.com/news/tried-trump-care-wing-terrorism-083050274.html
Betsy Woodruff Swan
PoliticoAugust 26, 2020, 1:30 AM MST
Elizabeth Neumann spent March 13 and 14 of 2019 at a conference in the picturesque Spanish port city of Málaga. The topic: terrorism. Western leaders were deeply worried about the dangers foreign terrorist fighters traveling back from places like Iraq, Libya and Syria would pose to their home countries. And that’s what Neumann expected to dominate the two-day event.
Neumann was DHS’s assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the time, handling counterterrorism work from the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. In Málaga, a history-drenched resort town on Spain’s Costa del Sol that once marked the fault line between the Muslim and Christian worlds, she and her counterparts from scores of countries spent long hours talking about the terrorism threats that concerned them most. After a while, she began to see a pattern: Though concerns about instability in the Middle East dominated most public discussions on counterterrorism, about 80 percent of the leaders at the conference ranked far-right extremism among their top concerns.
The next morning, when Neumann woke up early to catch a cab to the airport, her phone started lighting up with news alerts. A gunman had murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Prosecutors would later say the killer planned the attack to maximize casualties and terrify the Muslim community and non-European immigrants. Five months later, an American terrorist would cite him as an inspiration.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh — it’s happening now,’” Neumann recalled in an interview.
For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem.
This story is based on background and on-record interviews with current and former law enforcement officials, inside and outside DHS. It includes, for the first time, detailed comments from two top former political appointees in the department who tried to tackle the problem before giving up on the Trump administration. Frustrated by the president’s failure to act, they are actively supporting his opponent.
“At least in this administration,” Neumann said, “there’s not going to be anything substantive done on domestic terrorism.”
‘People were excited’
The Department of Homeland Security is one of the federal government’s biggest, newest and unhappiest departments. It was created amid the ashes of the Sept. 11 terror attacks as part of the government’s efforts to — as its name suggests — secure the U.S. homeland. It became something of the Island of Lost Agencies, holding everything from the Secret Service to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Coast Guard under its massive umbrella. Only the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have more employees. And the 230,000 employees at DHS consistently report miserable morale.
In the agency’s misery, Donald Trump saw opportunity. During the 2016 campaign, he touted the support of unions representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents. And after his inauguration, DHS was one of his first stops. He gave a major speech at its sprawling headquarters in northwest D.C. just five days into his administration, highlighting his focus on the department’s immigration and border security missions.
“It was hot as hell in the gym because there were so many people,” a former DHS official recalled. “People were excited. There was a moment of, DHS isn’t going to be the last on the list.”
But being at the top of Trump’s list also brought immense challenges for DHS leaders: namely, trying to amp up immigration enforcement enough to keep the White House happy while also managing the department’s panoply of other missions.
Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.
“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”
On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.
Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t.
“Sadly, the president botched his response, and it became much more about what the president said and how he botched it than it was about what just happened,” Neumann lamented. “This is not the America we know. We all had this collective, ‘What in the world? How is this happening in 2017?’”
John Kelly, a gruff four-star general, was leading the department at the time. Three months later, and just six months into his presidency, Trump fired Reince Priebus as chief of staff and replaced him with Kelly. Elaine Duke, then the department’s second-in-command, stepped in as acting DHS chief for a few months, and then the Senate confirmed Kirstjen Nielsen. As the senior leadership merry-go-round played out, the president’s demands for more deportations and fewer illegal border crossings stayed as high as ever.
Trump often expressed irritation when he saw the DHS secretary anywhere other than the border. Miles Taylor, who was Nielsen’s chief of staff, told POLITICO Trump used to lambaste her if she didn’t physically spend enough of her time there.
“Verbatim the president said, ‘Get your ass to the border, why are you not down there?’” Taylor said.
Another former DHS official, who requested anonymity to discuss the president’s comments, said Trump once fumed when he learned Nielsen was in Europe working on cybersecurity issues — even though cybersecurity is one of DHS’s many core missions.
“Why isn’t she on the border?” the official recalled Trump saying.
Senior DHS officials said they dealt with two constants from the White House: constant pressure to deliver on immigration, and constant chaos.
“When you are spending all of your energy preventing him from doing something illegal, you can’t then also run your State Department or your Defense Department or your DHS,” Neumann said, highlighting the challenges Trump presented to Cabinet secretaries. “So you’re heavily relying on the people underneath you: ‘Try to do your jobs as well as possible while we protect you from the chaos.’ But everyone in the system is experiencing the same thing.”
For instance, the Senate-confirmed general counsel for DHS, John Mitnick, reportedly warned the White House in February 2019 that a proposal to release undocumented immigrants into so-called sanctuary cities could get DHS sued for due process violations.
In a 2019 town hall meeting with a group of DHS lawyers, according to a source present, one attendee asked Mitnick what his biggest challenge was. His answer: finding time to work on anything other than immigration and border security. During the same event, Mitnick told attendees that they should inform their supervisors immediately if anyone ever pressured them to greenlight an illegal action or policy, and he promised to support them. Later that year, Mitnick was fired.
‘Bullshit’
Early in Nielsen’s tenure as secretary, she and Taylor discussed the domestic terror threat at length. In the months before her confirmation, a far-right extremist named Jeremy Christian had murdered two men on a train after harassing two Black teenage girls. One of the girls wore a hijab, according to news reports, and Christian yelled “fuck Muslims” at them. Just days after Nielsen was confirmed, a man with a swastika marking on his leg murdered two students at a high school in New Mexico before killing himself.
“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”
At the time, then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster was overseeing the drafting of a new national counterterrorism strategy. The document would lay out priorities for using resources from across the U.S. government to combat terrorism.
Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. Four months after Nielsen started as DHS secretary, Trump replaced McMaster with John Bolton. The process of drafting the counterterrorism strategy continued under Bolton’s leadership.
“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism.”
Nielsen wasn’t happy, according to Taylor.
“She was like, ‘What gives?’” Taylor said. “He was like, ‘We’re doing more drafts, we’re doing more turns on it, just stay tuned, we’ll work on this. And she said, ‘It’s very important to me that we emphasize domestic terrorism here. This has got to be an administration priority.’”
The final document, released on Oct. 4, 2018, contained just two short paragraphs on domestic terrorism. One noted that the U.S. faced internal threats from “racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.” A second promised that the government would “investigate ties between domestic terrorists not motivated by radical Islamist ideologies and their overseas counterparts to more fully understand them.”
It was brief.
“They said, ‘We’ll come up with a separate domestic terrorism strategy,” Taylor said. “Bullshit. They never did. It just got lost.”
Bolton declined to comment on this reporting. Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, said the Trump administration takes the domestic terrorism threat seriously.
“Our country is constantly facing dynamic threats ranging from domestic, to cyber, to international, to financial crimes,” she said in a statement to POLITICO. “Our brave federal law enforcement, national security, and Intelligence officials work around the clock to monitor every range of threats facing our nation, including domestic terror. This sounds more like a case of Miles Taylor being ineffective at his job, than an indictment of the brave men and women in security officials [sic], FBI, and federal law enforcement who work every day to protect our country from threats foreign and domestic.”
Three weeks after the strategy’s release on Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman named Robert Bowers murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Before the massacre, he posted a message on the social networking site Gab about a Jewish nonprofit that helps refugees settle in the U.S.
“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”
‘We’re just going to focus on the solutions’
From her perch at DHS, meanwhile, Neumann pushed for the department to do more to prevent domestic terror attacks — a concept national security hands refer to as “left of boom,” as in, before an explosion hits.
The FBI is the lead law enforcement agency for investigating domestic terror. But DHS’s close work with state and local law enforcement agencies around the country — as well as private sector and community partners — means it can also play a role. For instance, advisers from DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency provided a security training that Tree of Life members participated in before the shooting. A top CISA official later told Congress that members of the synagogue said that training saved lives.
So starting in February 2019, Neumann pushed to get new funding for the new Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention. And in May 2019, Neumann said, acting DHS head Kevin McAleenan made a series of phone calls to the Hill ringing alarm bells that DHS’s work on domestic terrorism was severely underfunded and urging members to fund the effort. After an extensive effort that initially circumvented the White House budgeting process, Congress gave DHS $17 million in new funding for the office and for grants.
The concept was to have DHS help state, local, and nongovernment leaders work in their communities to prevent and reverse violent extremism. Neumann compared it with the role DHS plays in firefighting: The department doesn’t send personnel with hoses and helicopters to put out wildfires. But it does help set standards, provide training and send out grant money. The goal — both when it comes to firefighting and to domestic terrorism — is to help communities protect themselves. It grew out of the Obama-era Office of Community Partnerships. That office had focused on helping communities counter violent extremism, and the Trump team had frozen its funding in the early days after the election to review its efforts.
George Selim, who oversees the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism and was the first director of the Office of Community Partnerships, said the Trump administration let the office stagnate.
“You can’t snap your fingers and create an office in a Cabinet-level agency,” he said. “The previous administration did all the work, found the director, hired a career staff, got a budget, got a home, gave it legal authority, went out and got grant money for it. And then the Trump administration comes in and effectively does nothing with it, and it stagnates for two years plus, three years almost.”
Taylor said the White House wasn’t initially all that interested in DHS’s efforts to turn the old office into a new one focused on terrorism and targeted violence.
“We were pushing the White House: ‘Make this a priority, talk about this, fight for money on Capitol Hill for this,’” he said. “It was on deaf ears. You could not have seen a White House less interested in this.”
Neumann said she wished DHS and the White House had both moved faster. There were National Security Council staff who wanted to strengthen the administration’s response to the growing threat, she said. But the dizzying cycle of leadership changes in the upper echelons of Trump’s national security team didn’t make it easy.
“There was no NSC structure that was systematically working on issues like that,” she said. “It’s not to say that they weren’t doing things; it’s just that when you have chaos all around you, it’s really hard to do process stuff.”
On Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He told investigators that he liked the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to The Wall Street Journal, and posted a manifesto of his own saying he wanted to kill as many Hispanics as he could.
On Aug. 4, a gunman killed nine people at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier this month, per CNN, the FBI said its investigation into the killer’s motives is ongoing.
After the weekend of massacres, White House officials became more interested in Neumann’s project. Officials told her they could point to her work to show they took the problem seriously. She briefed multiple officials on domestic terrorism issues and what the government could do to prevent attacks. One challenge was particularly thorny, however: The officials, who Neumann declined to name, didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism.”
“They very clearly were looking at it through the lens of, ‘We have a violence problem,’” Neumann recalled. “And they did not want to talk about the ideological threat.”
“It makes me sad that in every other circumstance where you’re trying to lay out a strategy to go after a threat, you always start by articulating what the threat is,” she continued. “But in this particular case, we were told, ‘We’re just going to focus on the solutions.’”
Despite that tension, Trump’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal sought $80 million for DHS’s work to prevent domestic terrorism and targeted violence, along with an additional $20 million in grant money for DHS to disburse. The House greenlit that new funding. But it’s unlikely the bill will go anywhere in an election year.
A White House document touting the work was titled “Combating Targeted Violence.”
“At DHS, your budget is always in competition for [border] wall money,” Neumann said. “So it’s not insignificant to have gotten that support.”
“That’s the good news story,” she added.
Neumann’s successful efforts to shave a little money off the wall budget for domestic terrorism prevention have not won her fame and fortune. But the work isn’t unnoticed. Russ Travers, who helmed the National Counterterrorism Center until this March, put it this way: “I consider her a national patriot.”
The office is now working to hire regional coordinators and disburse grant money.
“Obviously, this is a very new undertaking for us,” said DHS’s current second-in-command, Ken Cuccinelli, in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s somewhat untested. But that’s OK. We’ll test it. We’ll see. The challenge for even that if we go down the road five years and look backwards, is going to be the eternal challenge of understanding what you prevented. Things that don’t happen are hard to measure. But that’s OK.”
The month after the El Paso and Dayton shootings, on Sept. 20, 2019, acting DHS Secretary McAleenan signed off on a strategic framework on terrorism and targeted violence. Neumann helmed the work drafting the document. McAleenan had previously ordered an immediate review of the department’s domestic terrorism efforts when he became its acting chief, and had tasked its Homeland Security Advisory Council with specifically looking into protecting houses of worship. He recognized domestic terror was a significant emerging threat and that the department needed to shift to respond to it, former DHS official Andrew Meehan said.
“White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” the McAleenan framework document read.
Chad Wolf.
The new strategic framework also promised that DHS would begin releasing a yearly State of the Homeland Threat Assessment document. Eleven months later, the first such briefing has yet to materialize.
Two months after releasing the document that discussed the white supremacist threat, McAleenan resigned from DHS. A new acting secretary, Chad Wolf, took his place. On Jan. 17, 2020, Wolf gave a speech that discussed McAleenan’s document and terror threats.
“We’re working aggressively to develop the implementation plan, which will be ready in the coming weeks,” he said.
No such plan is public.
John Cohen, the department’s former counterterrorism coordinator, said DHS could bring tremendous expertise and capabilities to the effort to fight domestic terror.
“The challenge is bringing those resources together in a cohesive, coordinated, and comprehensive way,” he added.
And, he said, the president isn’t making it easy.
“Law enforcement officials are concerned that the political rhetoric used by the president to inspire his political base has been viewed by some violent white supremacists as a call to violent action, and has been viewed by a number of mentally unwell, violence-prone individuals as permission to engage in acts of violence,” he added.
‘Interrogate the shit out of every single one of them’
By May 2020, the administration’s hesitancy to use the term “domestic terrorism” had evaporated — at least as far as actors from the left were concerned. After weeks of protests and property damage in Portland, Ore., President Trump tweeted that he would designate antifa, a loose agglomeration of left-wing ‘anti-fascist’ activists, as a terrorist organization — a legal impossibility. Attorney General William Barr then made a statement using the phrase that so many Trump administration officials have been loath to use.
“The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly,” he said.
Critics said it showed a new, broad enthusiasm to talk about domestic terrorism when the left could be blamed for it. Cuccinelli told POLITICO he rejects that criticism.
“I think it’s B.S.,” he said. “I think it’s people that want to downplay the work we’ve done in the white supremacy area. But let’s face it, what is in the news every day for the last three months? It is left-wing, organized violence.”
Cuccinelli also said the department sees white supremacist domestic terrorism as a serious threat.
“Obviously we’ve got white supremacist-type people we’ve got to deal with, and what we find with them is that you see smaller numbers, smaller groups, you don’t see large gatherings of them, but that when they act, the level of their lethality is higher,” he said.
Senior department officials have shown a significant interest in combating the left-wing violence Cuccinelli described, both publicly and privately. On a DHS leadership call in the early days of the department’s response, Mark Morgan––the often-bombastic and always outspoken acting head of Customs and Border Protection — showed particular appetite for an aggressive federal response.
“We ought to detain and interrogate the shit out of every single one of them,” he said, according to two administration officials familiar with the call.
It wasn’t clear who specifically Morgan was referring to. Asked about this comment, a CBP spokesperson declined to comment.
Earlier in his tenure as acting CBP chief, Morgan also concerned officials there by floating the idea of moving a key CBP counterterrorism office under the umbrella of its Office of Intelligence. The office in question, called the National Targeting Center, plays a major role in protecting aviation from terrorism. CBP’s Office of Intelligence, meanwhile, focuses on border security. According to two sources familiar with the matter, CBP officials worried that Morgan’s interest in moving the NTC pointed to an effort to move resources away from counterterrorism and toward border security. A CBP spokesperson also declined to comment on this reporting.
One state law enforcement official, who requested anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the intelligence products DHS sends to its state and local partners emphasize the threat from left-wing extremists significantly more than the threat from right-wing extremists––and disproportionately so. Left-wing extremists have caused numerous problems and hurt police, the state official continued. “But none of them have been killed,” the official said. “But when we look at the far right, we’ve seen numerous attacks where cops have been killed.”
“I would expect at least a balanced production between far left and far right extremists,” the official continued.
The official also said he got much more helpful information on threats from the far right from the Anti-Defamation League than from DHS — particularly its material on Boogaloo, a coterie of extremists trying to incite a race war.
“They only have a handful of analysts at the ADL, and their handful of analysts put together a better product that the entire DHS,” the official said.
Earlier in the Trump administration, DHS’s intelligence arm disbanded a group of analysts focused on domestic terrorism.
Selim, of the ADL, said DHS’s sparse material for state and local partners on far-right threats and Boogaloo was concerning.
“It’s problematic,” he said. “The DHS’s mission and mandate is to protect against all threats both foreign and domestic.”
‘The Deep State’
Neumann said she isn’t satisfied with the progress she made and has called for an independent commission to work on how the federal government can manage the domestic terror threat.
The tendency to downplay that threat has existed in prior administrations, she noted, but the Trump team has taken that tendency to an extreme. “Anything domestic-related is kind of seen as the JV of the national security team,” she said.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies — a centrist Washington think tank known for its focus on international affairs and defense technology — released a briefing in June of this year concluding that the most significant terror threat to the U.S. appears to come from white supremacists. Right-wing extremists were responsible for two-thirds of terror attacks and plots in the U.S. last year, it found, and for 90 percent in the first four months of 2020.
Neumann left the department in April. Last week, she endorsed Joe Biden for president. Taylor and Mitnick have endorsed Biden as well.
“The good news is, the people who have been given the charge to protect the country — even the career officials who folks think are the deep state — they passionately care about their jobs and are going to do whatever it takes to protect the country,” she said.
Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.