FBI Ramps Up Spending to Fight MAGA Terrorism

The FBI is conducting three times as many domestic terrorism investigations than it was five years ago, with 70 percent of its open cases focused on "civil unrest" and anti-government activity, according to FBI documents and government specialists. The Bureau has also quietly changed the general classification of white supremacy, antisemitism, abortion-, and anti-LGBTQI+-related extremism to "hate crimes" rather than "terrorism." Since terrorism remains the top national security priority, this has lowered the visibility and resources dedicated to those issues.

The FBI considers all violent acts (and threats of violence) with a political motive to be terrorism, a senior government official explains to Newsweek. But not all acts of extremism are considered terrorism. "If an act is focused on the government, it's terrorism," the source says. "But if extremism is focused on private individuals or institutions, it's considered just a crime or classified as a hate crime." The source was granted anonymity to speak about classified matters.

On one level, the senior government source says, this is a more precise definition of domestic terrorism: the label is applied only to acts with political motives and mass casualties. But in reality, the tweaked classification inserts the FBI and counterterror investigators into the political life of the nation.

According to internal FBI numbers obtained by Newsweek, "Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism" was considered the prime threat (and dominated investigations) before January 6. Since then, anti-government, "anti-authority" and civil unrest cases have taken over as the number one threat, making up almost 90 percent of all investigations.

"A hate crime is targeted violence motivated by the offender's bias against a person's actual or perceived characteristics," said an FBI report issued in October, "while a DT [domestic terrorism] incident involves acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of criminal laws and in furtherance of a social or political goal." As the number of cases involving politics has expanded, the FBI has doubled the number of agents working on the subject.

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"It's not because the FBI is partisan, but more because society ... and Washington remains obsessed with January 6 and Donald Trump," says the senior government official. "It doesn't matter whether the activity is left or right, anti-Biden or anti-Trump," the official says. "That's the pool of suspected terrorists. In other words, the focus now is political terrorism."

Of 2,700 open cases, where an individual or group of individuals has been designated domestic terrorists by the FBI, almost a third relate to the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol or subsequent political activity connected to it. Since then, the counter-terrorism agencies have also focused on the transnational links of domestic individuals and groups—an approach that provides the intelligence agencies more authority to conduct surveillance and intrusive collection of information.

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Domestic terrorism investigations are being conducted in all fifty states and in all 56 FBI field offices, the FBI says, with more than double the number of investigators assigned to domestic terrorism work since January 6. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on November 17, discussing the number of open cases and what the FBI labels "domestic violent extremism."

"Individuals based and operating primarily within the United States or its territories without direction or inspiration from a foreign terrorist group or other foreign power who seek to further political or social goals, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence are described as DVEs [domestic violent extremists]," Wray told the Committee. (Foreign-inspired domestic terrorists are called HVEs, homeland violent extremists.)

The FBI uses five categories to describe violent extremism: Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVEs), including white supremacists; Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists (AGAAVEs), including everyone from militias to Antifa; violent extremism associated with "civil unrest"; animal rights/environmental violent extremists; and abortion-related violent extremists.

As of October 1, 2021, according to the latest FBI numbers, 69 percent of all investigations relate to anti-government and civil unrest-related acts. Military-related investigations constitute the most rapidly growing group since 2020. Racially and ethnically motivated acts constitute just 19 percent of the total number of investigations. Animal rights and environmental investigations make up one percent. Currently, there are no abortion-related extremism investigations that are labeled domestic terrorism. (The last abortion-related domestic terrorism investigation closed in September 2020, according to FBI records.)

About 11 percent of open investigations also fall into a sixth category: "all other." In a November 13, 2021 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI said: "We are ... increasingly seeing terrorism threats that do not fall neatly into categories: a growing number of subjects are individuals who are ascribing to blended or mixed ideologies, or even individualized belief systems, to justify their desire to commit violence."

In all categories, threats against law enforcement (the FBI itself and other law enforcement agencies) as well as towards government facilities has also tripled since January 6. "The domestic terrorism apparatus has naturally gravitated towards threats to law enforcement personnel and government facilities," the senior U.S. government official says. The Justice Department says that anti-government extremists have also targeted the military as well as U.S. government officials and members of Congress. "In other words," the official says, "Washington is obsessed with threats to Washington itself."

The effects of January 6 on the FBI's domestic terrorism work cannot be overstated. "During President Biden's first week in office," Attorney General Merrick Garland said, "he directed the Administration to undertake an assessment of the domestic terrorism threat." That assessment concluded that DVEs who were undertaking violent acts posed "an elevated threat to the Homeland." The number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations increased "significantly" in 2021, says FBI Director Wray. He told a Congressional oversight committee that the threat was "metastasizing across the country."

In March 2021, Wray said that the number of domestic terrorism investigations grew from around 1,000 when he became FBI director in 2017 to about 1,400 at the end of 2020. With the riot on January 6, that number doubled by March 2022. "We've surged personnel ..." Wray said this year, "more than doubling the number of people working that threat from a year before."

In mid-2021, the Biden administration issued a new National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security conducted its own Counterterrorism and Targeted Violence Posture Review. While most of the homeland security agencies are focused on international (or foreign-inspired) terrorism, DHS is also the primary government agency charged with protecting "critical infrastructure" including election systems, even those in private hands.

The FBI, now focusing on political activity, has to date charged more than 850 individuals with crimes associated with the breach of the Capitol building on January 6—and the entire group is treated as domestic terrorists. "The Bureau isn't partisan per se," says a senior FBI official, "though it finds itself investigating mostly MAGA and related political activity as domestic terrorism. Right-wing-oriented domestic terrorists—suspected terrorists—account for more than 80 percent of all cases in the anti-government category." The rest are associated with left-wing grievances or indeterminate political origins.

In conducting its investigations, the FBI says that it distinguishes between domestic terrorism and non-violent protest or "First Amendment" activity. "We can never open an investigation based solely around protected First Amendment rights," a FBI senior official said at a background briefing to the new media in February 2021. "We cannot and do not investigate ideology. We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security."

"The FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms," Wray said right after January 6. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen reiterated this point early this year, saying, "It is important to emphasize that we investigate and prosecute domestic violent extremists for their criminal acts, not for their beliefs or based on their associations."

The senior FBI official though, granted anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, explained to Newsweek that people's associations are, in practice, exactly what drives the FBI's thinking and its approach to thwarting domestic terrorism. First, organized crime dominated the Bureau's work, as a legacy institution, and it tends to see and look for conspiracies. The organized crime focus morphed after 9/11 to mapping and chasing new networks: al Qaeda, Hizb'allah, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, and ISIS.

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Second, though the FBI insists that it always has legal justification to open an investigation (that it is not just fishing for people to designate domestic terrorists), its work is dominated by investigations of groups and networks. Its pool of suspected terrorists includes those 850 arrested so far for crimes committed on January 6, plus militia groups, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Sovereign citizens, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Earth First, and on and on.

The FBI says that its greatest challenge is "lone wolves," those unaffiliated individuals who radicalize to violence alone, but the Bureau's natural tendency is to look for conspiracies. In its November 2021 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI conceded as much, saying that the Bureau "conducts comprehensive [domestic terrorism] investigations that build out criminal or terrorist networks to determine who is involved in the criminal activity and identify co-conspirators."

A third factor in adding new domestic terrorism investigations is the FBI practice, in its intelligence collection and link-analysis of suspected terrorists, of looking at family and friends of suspects—at the "networks" that are not necessarily the result of organized groups. A key part of post-January 6 investigative activities has been to look at these associates and to follow threads of family and friend connections (particularly on social media) to scout for links and co-conspirators, particularly as the FBI seeks to stop possible future terrorism.

After the 9/11 attacks, a new paradigm took over as the national strategy of dealing with terrorism. Rather than just conduct investigations after events occurred, now the focus was on preventing them in the first place. Stopping terrorism before it happens has been the entire career focus of most FBI agents and intelligence analysts in the 20-year war on terrorism, and is now being applied to domestic terrorism. The FBI and the Intelligence Community are already significantly increasing their monitoring of social media and working more closely with local law enforcement to uncover potential plots and monitor individuals and groups. The scrutiny itself may make it more likely that those who have a grievance with the government will intensify their activities.

As the questions relating to domestic terrorism become more politicized—Who is a terrorist? Is the government going after the right wing? Is it stifling free speech?—the FBI has also made administrative changes that skew its own numbers. In 2019, some categories of extremism previously labeled domestic terrorism, such as abortion-related extremism and antisemitic and anti-Asian acts, were removed from the "terrorism" category (and under the authority of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division). The Civil Rights and Criminal Divisions now deal with the majority of cases that many Americans associate with terrorism. Recognizing that there is some nexus with its newly created distinction, the FBI has established a Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell to address the intersection.

This change in record-keeping accounts for the fact that there are no abortion-related domestic terrorism investigations, even in the heated environment following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. In 2020, the last year for which there are reliable numbers, law enforcement agencies reported 8,263 hate crime incidents in the United States. Only one percent of all domestic terrorism investigations that year were categorized as abortion-extremism related. In fiscal year 2021, there were none. FBI sources say that there are no abortion-related cases designated domestic terrorism cases as of October 2022.

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"It might be jarring to some people [the reclassification of abortion-related acts] but we've become too prone to labeling anything we don't like as extremism, and then any extremist as a terrorist.... Perhaps the silver lining is that we're due for a deeper look overall into these definitions, and what are the actual threats," the senior FBI official wrote to Newsweek.

"A couple of thousand domestic terror investigations just doesn't constitute a threat to the country, or to democracy," the senior government official added, assessing the overall threat of domestic terrorism. "Of course violence is unacceptable, but it is also just a crime. We don't need to label Americans who break the law or who brandish guns or who oppose the government as terrorists, and to do so, [that] places the FBI in the middle of a larger sickness tearing at our society."

FBI director Wray seems to agree, saying that "non-violent protests are signs of a healthy democracy, not an ailing one."

"Scratch the surface and the number of Americans who want to overthrow the government or even weaken democracy is tiny," says the senior government official. "But the numbers give a wrong impression, when it is just the bureaucracy doing what it does best—serving its own interests."