New documents show that the Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters.
The findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump's acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland was made public this month.
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The ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain is raised in the report. DHS analysts recounted orders to create organizational charts that could be used to establish links between the arrested protesters, but failed to prove shared a central source of funding.
The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers' protest containment, as well as "twisted efforts" by the Trump administration to manufacture a domestic terrorist threat. The report describes the DHS's information as having detailed the past whereabouts and the friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests. Intelligence analysts were concerned about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being anarchist extremists because there wasn't enough evidence to support the claim.
A field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were thrown together quickly and they didn't know why some people were arrested. It was not clear if the arrests were made by police or one of the agencies on the ground. A witness told investigators that the analysts didn't get arrest affidavits or paperwork because they assumed everyone on the list would be arrested. 13 of the 43 dossiers were found to be related to non violent crimes, according to the report. It was not clear to analysts and investigators if the cases had any relationship to federal property.
According to the report, at least one witness told investigators that people who were not arrested but accused of threats had been asked for evidence. According to an email exchange between top intelligence officials, dossiers were created on people who had nothing to do with homeland security.
The report says that the agency's chief intelligence officer acknowledged fielding requests by Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to create dossiers against everyone participating in the Portland protest. Brian Murphy, the head of the agency's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, told interviewers that he had rejected the idea of looking at people who had been arrested.
According to the DHS report, senior leadership was told to apply the label "violent antifascists inspired" to Portland protesters unless they had something different.
The emergence of the threat center made it clear that the DHS had no real way of tying the protesters to terrorist activity. Efforts to drum up evidence to support the administration's claim that a "larger network was directing or financing" the protesters diverted away from its usual work of analyzing national security threats
Fears of political toadies occupying key intelligence roles had been aired publicly by former intelligence community members during the Trump administration, but their concerns were all but ignored by Senate Republicans during confirmation hearings that would damage a number of agencies.
The report is based on interviews with employees from various agencies. In response to leaks of internal DHS emails in July 2020 that prompted questions from lawmakers about potential intelligence abuses, the investigation began.
The nation's "top spy," the director of national intelligence, drafts daily top- secret briefings for the president. The directorship was held throughout the protests by John Ratcliffe, a Republican of Texas and renowned Trump loyalist, whose nomination to the post was withdrawn initially in 2019?
The agency's Operational Background Reports are known as "baseball cards." The current and emerging threats center was given the task of creating them with little to no guidance on execution. The agency's Field Operations Division, which works closely with House and Senate committee staffers, is one of the agencies that would have received the information. The extent to which entities outside the federal government were supposed to be involved is unclear, but the report indicates that DHS state and local partners could have also been in the loop.
Funded to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars, the Federal Protective Service is comprised of thousands of security officers drawn from private contractors. The staff included elite warfighters recruited from among the Navy SEALS, the Army Rangers, and the Marines.
The tactical unit of the U.S. marshals service, normally tasked with making the arrests of the nation, was brought in to help with the protests in Portland. Executive Order 13933 authorized a mission dubbed "Operation Diligent Valor" to capture "anarchists and left-wing extremists" who'd been driven by Floyd's murder to target U.S. monuments.
More than 100 days of continuous marches were held in Portland after Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. There were nightly standoffs between protesters toting bottles, fruit, and fireworks and riot-control squad armed with nightsticks, pepper spray, and "kinetic impact munitions" designed to irritate, disorient, and compel compliance through pain.
Police would rack up 6,000 documented use-of-force cases against the demonstrators, who in turn caused more than $2 million in damage to federal buildings. Police ran off legal observers and beat a journalist who was injured by federal agents. In response to the bad press, Justice Department lawyers filed a motion in court to give police the power to remove reporters from the streets.
There were reports of protesters being taken away by men in military fatigues. The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged the abductions and the fact that agents had taken steps to keep their identities secret.
LexisNexis is a tool used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to find immigrants who are not US citizens. The tool referred to asTangles was used to gather information from the subject's social media profiles.
According to the report, Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, received a request for a dossier.
The first leak that set off the investigation was published by Wittes. The Department of Homeland Security plans to act on Trump's executive order after leaked guidance, known as a "job aid", was disclosed in July 2020. Lawfare reported that the document implicated some parts of the intelligence community. The DHS memo that was leaked by the New York Times summarized some of the things that had been written about.
On July 26th, a week after Lawfare published the guidance document, a leaked email from the acting chief intelligence officer of the Department of Homeland Security was published on the social media site.
Headlines shifted to focus on the narrative crafted by the president's flailing reelection campaign, a pre-packed delusion designed to strike fear in voters' imaginations and tether Democrats to a fictional terrorist threat.
Nothing could be done to stop Trump from continuing to spread the claims. In the final months before the election, Trump claimed that it was a part of the campaign of the left-wing group. The Democrats act like they don't know what they're talking about.
John Ratcliffe, Trump's highest ranking intelligence crony, would go on to play the only card left with the assistance of Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Graham posted a letter on the internet before the debate. Four years ago, a Republican-led committee ignored a bunch of Russian misinformation. It focused on Hillary Clinton because she had no election to lose.
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