For months, Donald Trump and his administration’s law enforcement officials have made an aggressive, concerted effort to portray anti-fascist protesters as a highly organized group that poses a grave domestic terrorist threat. As Black Lives Matter protests erupted in late May following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the president made the legally dubious assertion that the U.S. government “will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” Last month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson pressed Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf about why the “leaders of antifa and BLM” have yet to be arrested and locked up, to which Wolf replied that the Justice Department is working on “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations.” Attorney General William Barr also recently labeled antifa “organized…revolutionaries.” (The only evidence he offered to back his claims about antifa’s operational prowess was that “They have websites.”)
On Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray directly contradicted the White House’s anti-antifa messaging push while testifying in front of the House Homeland Security Committee. “It’s not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology,” he said, explaining that “folks who subscribe or identify” with antifa do not operate at a national level, but instead organize “regionally into small groups or nodes.”
When asked about the greatest domestic terrorism threats facing the U.S., Wray did not name antifa. Instead, he cited the kinds of violent extremists historically more likely to side with the president. “Within the domestic terrorism bucket, the category as a whole, racially motivated violent extremism is, I think, the biggest bucket within that larger group, within the racially motivated violent extremist bucket,” said Wray. “People ascribing to some kind of white supremacist-type ideologies is certainly the biggest chunk of that.” The bureau chief went on to note that, when it comes to extremist violence in the U.S., 2019 was the deadliest year since 1995, when white supremacist Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people by bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City.
Wray did make a statement in line with what Trump officials have said about investigating members of antifa along with other extremists: “To be clear, we do have quite a number of properly predicated domestic terrorism investigations into violent anarchists, extremists, any number of whom self-identify with the antifa movement, and that’s part of this broader group of domestic violence extremists that I’m talking about,” he said. ”But it’s just one part of it.” But Wray’s classification of antifa as a movement, rather than a structured group, goes against unfounded claims Trump has made about antifa, including that there was an “entire plane filled up with looters, the anarchists, rioters” flying from city to city “looking for trouble” during the height of the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In August, Senator Rand Paul floated a similar conspiracy theory, saying that protesters who gathered outside the White House during the Republican National Convention were “paid” employees in an organized “interstate criminal” gang.
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