From the earliest days of the recent protests against police brutality and racism, some top federal law enforcement officials viewed the demonstrators with alarm and called for an aggressive federal response that two months later continues to escalate.
A memo from the deputy director of the F.B.I., dated June 2, demanded an immediate mobilization as protests gathered after George Floyd’s death while he was in police custody a week earlier. David L. Bowdich, the F.B.I.’s No. 2, declared the situation “a national crisis,” and wrote that in addition to investigating “violent protesters, instigators” and “inciters,” bureau leaders should collect information with “robust social media exploitation teams” and examine what appeared to be “highly organized behavior.”
Mr. Bowdich suggested that the bureau could make use of the Hobbs Act, put into place in the 1940s to punish racketeering in labor groups, to charge the protesters.
On Tuesday, Attorney General William P. Barr took the same tone, saying strife in Portland, Ore., was not a protest at all, but “an assault on the government of the United States.”
“Remarkably, the response from many in the media and local elected offices to this organized assault has been to blame the federal government,” Mr. Barr told the House Judiciary Committee. “To state what should be obvious, peaceful protesters do not throw explosives into federal courthouses.”
Privately, domestic intelligence agents are uncertain about the root causes of those actions. Another internal government memo, from Department of Homeland Security intelligence officers, indicated that even as federal agents in camouflage deployed to quell the unrest in Portland, the administration had little understanding of what it was facing.
The memo tried to put the recent conflict into historical context, describing how “anarchist extremists” have committed crimes in the Pacific Northwest for years and asserting that “sustained violence against government personnel and facilities” had longstanding roots.
But even as it laid out a timeline of violence extending back to 2015, the intelligence briefing, dated July 16, admitted, “We have low confidence in our assessment” when it comes to the present day. “We lack insight into the motives for the most recent attacks,” it read.
At the end of May, as protests against police brutality and racism sprang up across the country, Mr. Trump decided the unrest was the work of “antifa,” a leaderless coalition of people who oppose fascism but have at times used vandalism and violence to make their points.
Since then, federal prosecutors have brought charges against demonstrators across the country for crimes that would typically be handled locally. In Delaware and Alabama, prosecutors brought charges against people who each smashed the window of a police car. In Ohio, prosecutors charged someone for burning a parking-attendant booth.
Federal law enforcement has a duty to investigate the organizing of crimes across state lines, said John McKay, a former U.S. attorney appointed under President George W. Bush. Federal crimes around banks or guns are also common targets. But, he said, a broken window or robberies would typically be left to the local authorities. “The feds shouldn’t come in unless there is a clear indication of federal crime and a federal interest,” he said.
But outside the administration, a consensus is emerging: The deployment of the federal agents is perpetuating the unrest. “They’ve become the story,” John Sandweg, a former acting general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, said of the federal deployments. “The protests are feeding off their presence.”
In the July 16 intelligence briefing memo, the department [DHS] concluded the “sustained violence against government personnel and facilities in Portland, Ore., since May reflects the enduring threat environment in the region since at least 2015.” The memo included a timeline of violent episodes in Seattle and Olympia, Wash., as well as in Portland. (The timeline specified two episodes involving “white supremacist extremists.”)
But the memo, prepared by the Counterterrorism Mission Center, also admitted that “we have low confidence in our assessment that sustained violence against government personnel and facilities in Portland, Ore., since May reflects the enduring threat environment in the region because we lack insight into the motives for the most recent attacks.” The agency may have been raising questions about the accuracy of its findings, but its leaders have shown no such qualms. Last week, Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, referred to protests in Portland in 2018 that prompted the department to temporarily shut down a detention center run by its Immigration Customs Enforcement. “There’s a little bit of a pattern here that obviously I’m concerned about,” Mr. Wolf said.
Department officials have said the training the teams received to handle crowds of migrants at the border and riots in detention facilities has prepared them for Portland.
Chuck Wexler, the director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said federal officials could be engaging in a dialogue with activist leaders and local politicians during the day to calm tensions ahead of nighttime protests. The opposite is occurring. “I don’t know who’s benefiting from this,” Mr. Wexler said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/us/f ... tests.html
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