Stonewalling by the FBI has made it difficult to assess and improve government efforts to fight domestic terrorism.
www.brennancenter.org
Senate Committee Finds FBI Response to White Supremacist Violence Woefully Inadequate
Stonewalling by the FBI has made it difficult to assess and improve government efforts to fight domestic terrorism.
Last week, a Senate committee issued a scathing
appraisal of the government’s response to white supremacist violence. This conclusion from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee isn’t a surprise. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, the agencies primarily responsible for investigating domestic terrorism and gathering intelligence to prevent it, have been
repeatedly criticized for their inattention to white supremacist violence.
Even stalwart
defenders of the FBI have recognized that its failure to treat far-right violence as a serious concern contributed to the lack of preparation for the January 6 Capitol attack and have called on the bureau to conduct an internal review of its domestic terrorism program.
But the new Senate report makes clear that the FBI is not willing to critically examine its performance in combatting white supremacist violence and instead has taken steps to obscure the data necessary to conduct such an appraisal. Public concerns regarding far-right violence increased in the aftermath of the 2015 racially motivated mass shooting at the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which then-FBI Director James Comey
refused to call an act of terrorism. Concerns intensified after law enforcement
failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report
revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats.
Congress took note, and starting in 2018, several committees
began holding hearings focused on white supremacist and far-right militant violence, the first since the FBI and DHS declared counterterrorism their number one priority in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Throughout this time, the FBI failed to provide basic facts about its domestic terrorism program that would enable an assessment of whether it was appropriately targeting its counterterrorism resources. This lack of transparency triggered
several legislative efforts to compel the FBI to publish data documenting each domestic terrorism incident, the number of investigations it initiated, and the number of convictions, all broken down by the various categories the FBI used to manage its work, which then included white supremacists, so-called Black Identity Extremists, animal rights extremists, and others.
Even before the law requiring the FBI to produce this data
was enacted in 2019, bureau managers took measures to prevent Congress from getting the information it sought. The FBI
rearranged its domestic terrorism categories, combining white supremacists with Black Identity Extremists and far-right militants with anarchists, reorganizations that made little operational sense but would obscure which groups in each category committed the most deadly violence and which the bureau most frequently targeted for investigation.
In the end, it mattered little, as the report notes, because the FBI simply refused to comply with the requirements of the law. In reports filed in
2021 and
2022, the FBI argued that while it could provide topline statistics regarding the number of investigations it opened, it couldn’t provide data regarding domestic terrorism incidents because the bureau didn’t collect it and no law required state and local law enforcement agencies to report it.
