Trump Team Prepping New Strategy for Domestic Terrorism
Goodbye January 6, hello “Hands Off” protesters
The Trump administration is quietly drafting a bold new strategy for combating terrorism that targets a wide range of perceived foes, from Tesla vandals to everyday protesters, intelligence sources say.
White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is leading the effort, which covers both foreign and domestic strategies. Gorka recently boasted that the president has “done a 180 on our counterterrorism policy.” He’s also been quite candid in comparing his political opponents to terrorists, as I’ve written about.
The domestic focus derives from the view that foreign control, antisemitism and a conspiracy against Donald Trump are behind everything from Gaza protests to Planned Parenthood. White House insiders firmly believe that protestors are being “paid” to disrupt the Trump agenda, the same sources say.
“I think when they catch these people, you'll find they're paid by highly political people on the left," President Trump said last month. Attorney General Pam Bondi echoed the view, saying, of Tesla vandals: “If you're funding this, we're coming after you.”
Gorka and his team see America as a complex battlefield, where illegal immigrants, drug runners, sex traffickers, and money launderers have had free reign over the past four years. Now he wants to drop the hammer.
In an interview with Breitbart this week, Gorka decries “the feckless lack of leadership that was the Biden administration” when it came to dealing with those who threaten America or its allies.
To demonstrate its 180, the White House has already conducted strikes in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia that it describes as more timely and intense than previously, long-identified potential attacks on “high value targets” that it claims were languishing on Biden drawing boards.
Gorka brags about the ease with which he and his team have gotten Donald Trump to change direction.
“The danger,” one senior intelligence official told us, is that the team preparing the strategy are all warfighters, seeing America as no different than the Middle East.
When then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism in 2021, it was a response to January 6, basically casting the MAGA rioters as terrorists threatening the very survival of American democracy.
Biden’s 2021 strategy was itself alarming, casting as threats all kinds of Americans, including social media users, gamers, and students. In fact, the strategy led to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security establishing a backchannel with social media and gaming companies like Roblox, Discord and Reddit in order to monitor communications and map networks, approaches it had long used overseas.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published this week sheds light on the government’s domestic terrorism strategy, from Biden to the present, alluding to the online element in particular:
“Most of the threat assessments [of the last four years] we reviewed, as well as the 2021 Strategy, indicate that domestic terrorists increasingly rely on online platforms, such as gaming and social media platforms, to radicalize and mobilize their views … Similarly, the 2021 Strategy notes that domestic terrorists use internet-based communications, such as social media, file-upload sites, and end-to-end encrypted platforms, which can amplify threats to public safety …”
Now, the rewrite of the National Strategy document is shaping up to comport with Trump’s view of the country, the GAO hints and others say, rescinding the previous approach and altering the focus of counterterrorism actions over the next four years. That includes focusing more on Trump’s political opponents and framing petty crimes taking place at day-to-day protests as terrorism.
Counterterrorism is a fancy way for the government to refer to the business of pre-crime. Designed to prevent attacks before they happen, counterterrorism doesn’t need a crime on which to predicate its activities. Counterterror personnel are not law enforcers investigating a crime after it has occurred. They look for predictors of an attack. This process of divination partially relies on so-called “mobilization indicators,” characteristics that could move people to carry out acts of extremist violence.
Ever had a heated argument expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione or HAMAS? Or bought military-style tactical equipment? Or withdrawn from family? If so, you meet the government’s criteria listed in its 2021 “Mobilization Indicators” booklet, a document intended to help local and state police to spot a terrorist.
These criteria might strike you as creepy because, as the booklet itself concedes, “many of the mobilization indicators included in this booklet may also relate to constitutionally protected activities.”
As part of the Trump administration’s push to bring the National Counterterrorism Strategy in line with its own worldview, the National Counterterrorism Center in February issued a new behavioral indicators report geared towards those in the education sector. That supplement to the 2021 initial indicators report follows earlier Biden-era updates dealing with threats to the technology and defense sectors, as well as critical infrastructure protection.
“So-called Tesla terrorism and potential anti-Trump violence is driving new articulations of the threat,” the senior intelligence official says. The big difference now is that Trump, rather than Biden, is in charge.
The White House is already arresting and attempting to deport foreign students who it says participated in protests that did damage to America. They even have a policy in place to spy on their social media accounts, as I recently reported, hunting for their own list of terrorism indicators.
Trump, his Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have all called violence against Tesla vehicles, dealerships and equipment terrorism. Patel during his swearing in vowed to put on “the world’s largest manhunt” against “anyone that wishes to do harm to our way of life and our citizens.”
In describing Biden’s National Counterterrorism Strategy, the GAO points out that four years later, the full extent of the measures taken to implement the strategy are still not publicly known. The GAO says that “officials from DHS, DOJ, and State told us that the classified implementation plan includes some additional guidance for classified activities”; and that “DHS and DOJ officials told us that they conduct additional activities to respond to the 2021 Strategy that are classified.”
Though now cast in the role of Trump statesman, speaking with his faux Kissinger accent and donning pocket squares and cufflinks, Sebastian Gorka, numerous officials tell us, is also a gun nut and war enthusiast who loves Israel and hates everything and anything Biden. Secret operations are central to Gorka’s view of the world. He has taken to vociferously thanking special operators and intelligence people, and even the government of Pakistan, for doing their jobs.
“Characterize the enemy, disrupt the internal workings of conspiratorial actors, eliminate the leadership, all of the strategies against al Qaeda and ISIS are being brought home in thinking about a new domestic strategy,” the senior intelligence official says.
“These are warfighters, and proud of it,” the official adds. “They are exactly the wrong team to revise our national strategy for what happens inside the United States.”
— Edited by William M. Arkin
I'm just at a loss for words at this point
Am I now on the counter-terrorism list for liking The Klip?