Reinventing the Antifa Terror Threat

Experts shake their heads at FBI official’s testimony

Senior FBI national security official Michael Glasheen struggled to answer basic questions about Antifa after naming it a top terror threat (Times Now)

Until this year, U.S. intelligence agencies never briefed White House officials about any potential terrorism threats from Antifa — despite striking testimony from a FBI official Thursday describing the self-styled anti-fascist movement as “the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing,” according to two former top counter-terrorism officials. .

The testimony about Antifa before a House committee by Michael Glasheen, described as “operations director” for the FBI’s National Security Branch, was met with considerable incredulity, especially after he was confronted by questions from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) demanding details, such as where Antifa was located and how many members it had.

Glasheen grew flustered and tried to dodge the questions from Thompson, the panel’s top Democrat,, finally saying that the matter was “very fluid” and “investigations are active.”

Among those also puzzled was Joshua Geltzer, who as White House deputy homeland security advisor helped craft the Biden administration’s strategy for combatting domestic violent extremism and later served as legal advisor to the National Security Council.

Speaking on the SpyTalk podcast Thursday, shortly after Glasheen’s testimony, Geltzer was asked whether intelligence professionals had “flagged Antifa” as a threat when he was helping to write the administration’s domestic violent extremism strategy.

“It was not,” he said. “You can go back to that document. You can look at the threat assessment essentially that was provided to us.” And while the strategy listed terrorist groups by categories, “I don’t think you will see among the kind of categories named there, Antifa.”

And for good reason, a former senior FBI official told SpyTalk. Until this year, when President Trump designated Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” — calling it a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government”— the FBI did not even consider Antifa as part of its domestic terror matrix. “It’s not even a group,” said the former senior bureau official, who expressed astonishment at Glasheen’s testimony, saying “you got to be fucking kidding me” when first told about what the official had said and later calling his comments “absurd.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) asked Michael Glasheen where Antifia was located and how many people it had (CNN)

“There’s no organization,”said the ex-official, who asked not to be identified by name. “It’s a bunch of anarchists and actors running around the country.” While self-styled Antifa activists have gotten into scuffles with right wing protestors, “there’s no evidence of a terrorist threat. This is a stupid topic.”

Not to mention legally dubious. As Geltzer pointed out, Trump’s labelling Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” carries no legal weight. It “is not a statutorily created category, it’s not a foreign terrorist organization, it’s not a specially designated global terrorist. Those are things with groundings and in statute.” Instead, “this is kind of a phrase attached to this entity or movement or whatever the right characterization [of it] is.”

(In the same fashion, Attorney General Pam Bondi this week ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo first published by investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein at Substack The focus of the order is on those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”)

Geltzer also pushed back against separate testimony at the same House Homeland Security Committee hearing by Joe Kent, a former top aide to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and now the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC.)

Kent, a Trump appointee, still serves under Gabbard ,told the panel that “18,000 terrorists or suspected terrorists” had entered the country during the four years that President Biden was in office. He provided no details on how NCTC had arrived at that number. An official in Gabbard’s office later emailed SpyTalk that “all of the figures described by Director Kent today are drawn from intelligence collected, assessed, and analyzed by our NCTC screening and vetting teams in coordination with our law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.” The official added that NCTC had separately added 35,000 “narco-terrorists” to NCTC’s terrorist watch list, but didn’t clarify whether some portion of those people –presumably suspected drug smugglers like the ones the U.S. military are blowing up in the Caribbean–are included in the 18,000.

That is “definitely not a number that resonates with my experience,” said Geltzer when asked about the 18,000 terrorists testimony. Moreover, the idea that the principal terror threat derives from undocumented migrants crossing the border conflicts with extensive evidence that most of the attacks inside the country in recent years have come from homegrown lone-wolves.

“It is overwhelmingly the case that those who have engaged in or even attempted to engage in terrorist activity over the past couple of decades, were radicalized on US soil,” said Geltzer. “This is not my invention. This is the findings of the U.S. government, but also of outside researchers and academics.”