Global right-wing extremism networks are growing --

America Is just now catching up

By Pro Publica
Published January 22, 2021

Des Moines, IA / USA - 01/30/2020: Enthusiastic Trump supporters waiting for the arrival of President Donald J.
Trump on Thursday 01/30/2020 at his Keep America Great rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

During the past two years, U.S. counterterrorism of cials held meetings with their
European counterparts to discuss an emerging threat: right-wing terror groups
becoming increasingly global in their reach.

American neo-Nazis were traveling to train and ght with militias in the Ukraine.
There were suspected links between U.S. extremists and the Russian Imperial
Movement, a white supremacist group that was training foreigners in its St.
Petersburg compounds. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart
in 2019 had denounced a “Hispanic invasion" and praised a white supremacist who
killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch New Zealand and who had been
killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and who had been
inspired by violent American and Italian racists.

But the efforts to improve transatlantic cooperation against the threat ran into a
recurring obstacle. During talks and communications, senior Trump administration
of cials steadfastly refused to use the term “right-wing terrorism," causing disputes
and confusion with the Europeans, who routinely use the phrase, current and former
European and U.S. of cials told ProPublica. Instead, the FBI and Department of
Homeland Security referred to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,"
while the State Department chose “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism."

“We did have problems with the Europeans," one national security of cial said. “They
call it right-wing terrorism and they were angry that we didn't. There was a real
aversion to using that term on the U.S. side. The aversion came from political
appointees in the Trump administration. We very quickly realized that if people
talked about right-wing terrorism, it was a nonstarter with them."

The U.S. response to the globalization of the far-right threat has been slow, scattered
and politicized, U.S. and European counterterrorism veterans and experts say.
Whistleblowers and other critics have accused DHS leaders of downplaying the
threat of white supremacy and slashing a unit dedicated to ghting domestic
extremism. DHS has denied those accusations.

In 2019, a top FBI of cial told Congress the agency devoted only about 20% of its
counterterrorism resources to the domestic threat. Nonetheless, some FBI eld
of ces focus primarily on domestic terrorism.

Former counterterrorism of cials said the president's politics made their job harder.
The disagreement over what to call the extremists was part of a larger concern about
whether the administration was committed to ghting the threat.

“The rhetoric at the White House, anybody watching the rhetoric of the president,
this was discouraging people in government from speaking out," said Jason Blazakis,
who ran a State Department counterterrorism unit from 2008 to 2018. “The
president and his minions were focused on other threats."

Other former of cials disagreed. Federal agencies avoided the term “right-wing
terrorism" because they didn't want to give extremists legitimacy by placing them on
the political spectrum, or to fuel the United States' intense polarization, said
hi h i h h f d di f i i l
Christopher K. Harnisch, the former deputy coordinator for countering violent
extremism in the State Department's counterterrorism bureau. Some causes
espoused by white supremacists, such as using violence to protect the environment,
are not regarded as traditionally right-wing ideology, said Harnisch, who stepped
down this week.

“The most important point is that the Europeans and the U.S. were talking about the
same people," he said. “It hasn't hindered our cooperation at all."

As for the wider criticism of the Trump administration, Harnisch said: “In our work
at the State Department, we never faced one scintilla of opposition from the White
House about taking on white supremacy. I can tell you that the White House was
entirely supportive."

The State Department focused mostly on foreign extremist movements, but it

examined some of their links to U.S. groups as well.

There was clearly progress on some fronts. The State Department took a historic step
in April by designating the Russian Imperial Movement and three of its leaders as
terrorists, saying that the group's trainees included Swedish extremists who carried
out bombing attacks on refugees. It was the rst such U.S. designation of a far-right
terrorist group.

With Trump now out of of ce, Europeans and Americans expect improved
cooperation against right-wing terrorists. Like the Islamist threat, it is becoming
clear that the far-right threat is international. In December, a French computer
programmer committed suicide after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to U.S.
extremist causes. The recipients included a neo-Nazi news website. Federal agencies
are investigating, but it is not yet clear whether anything about the transaction was
illegal, of cials said.

“It's like a transatlantic thing now," said a European counterterror chief, describing
American conspiracy theories that surface in the chatter he tracks. “Europe is taking
ideology from U.S. groups and vice versa."

The Crackdown

International alliances make extremist groups more dangerous, but also create
vulnerabilities that law enforcement could exploit.
Laws in Europe and Canada allow authorities to outlaw domestic extremist groups
and conduct aggressive surveillance of suspected members. America's civil liberties
laws, which trace to the Constitution's guarantee of free speech spelled out in the
First Amendment, are far less expansive. The FBI and other agencies have
considerably more authority to investigate U.S. individuals and groups if they
develop ties with foreign terror organizations. So far, those legal tools have gone
largely unused in relation to right-wing extremism, experts say.

To catch up to the fast-spreading threat at home and abroad, Blazakis said, the U.S.
should designate more foreign organizations as terrorist entities, especially ones
that allied nations have already outlawed.

A recent case re ects the kind of strategy Blazakis and others have in mind. During
the riots in May after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, FBI agents got a tip
that two members of the anti-government movement known as the Boogaloo Bois
had armed themselves, according to court papers. The suspects were talking about
killing police of cers and attacking a National Guard armory to steal heavy weapons,
the court papers allege. The FBI deployed an undercover informant who posed as a
member of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group, and offered to help the suspects
obtain explosives and training. After the suspects started talking about a plot to
attack a courthouse, agents arrested them, according to the court papers. In
September, prosecutors led charges of conspiring and attempting to provide
material support to a foreign terrorist organization, which can bring a sentence of up
to 20 years in prison. One of the defendants pleaded guilty last month. The other still
faces charges.

If the U.S. intelligence community starts using its vast resources to gather
information on right-wing movements in other countries, it will nd more linkages
to groups in the United States, Blazakis and other experts predicted. Rather than
resorting to a sting, authorities could charge American extremists for engaging in
propaganda activity, nancing, training or participating in other actions with foreign
counterparts.

A crackdown would bring risks, however. After the assault on the Capitol, calls for
bringing tougher laws and tactics to bear against suspected domestic extremists
revived fears about civil liberties similar to those raised by Muslim and human rights
organizations during the Bush administration's “war on terror." An excessive
response could give the impression that authorities are criminalizing political views,
which could worsen radicalization among right-wing groups and individuals for
whom suspicion of government is a core tenet.

“You will hit a brick wall of privacy and civil liberties concerns very quickly," said
Seamus Hughes, a former counterterrorism of cial who is now deputy director of the
Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He said the federal
response should avoid feeding into “the already existing grievance of government
overreach. The goal should be marginalization."

In recent years, civil liberties groups have warned against responding to the rise in
domestic extremism with harsh new laws.

“Some lawmakers are rushing to give law enforcement agencies harmful additional
powers and creating new crimes," wrote Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU's
national security project, in a statement by the organization about congressional
hearings on the issue in 2019. “That approach ignores the way power, racism, and
national security laws work in America. It will harm the communities of color that
white supremacist violence targets — and undermine the constitutional rights that
protect all of us."

The Pivot Problem

There is also an understandable structural problem. Since the Sept. 11 attacks in

2001, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have dedicated themselves to the
relentless pursuit of al-Qaida, the Islamic State, Iran and other Islamist foes.

Now the counterterrorism apparatus has to shift its aim to a new menace, one that is
more opaque and diffuse than Islamist networks, experts said.

It will be like turning around an aircraft carrier, said Blazakis, the former State
Department counterterrorism of cial, who is now a professor at the Middlebury
Institute of International Studies.

“The U.S. government is super slow to pivot to new threats," Blazakis said. “There is a
reluctance to shift resources to new targets. And there was a politicization of
intelligence during the Trump administration. There was a fear to speak out."

Despite periodic resistance and generalized disorder in the Trump administration,

some agencies advanced on their own, of cials said. European counterterror of cials
say the FBI has become increasingly active in sharing and requesting intelligence
about right-wing extremists overseas.

A European counterterror chief described recent conversations with U.S. agents

about Americans attending neo-Nazi rallies and concerts in Europe and traveling to
join the Azov Battalion, an ultranationalist Ukrainian militia ghting Russian-backed
separatists. About 17,000 ghters from 50 countries, including at least 35 Americans,
have traveled to the Ukrainian con ict zone, where they join units on both sides,
according to one study. The ghting in the Donbass region offers them training,
combat experience, international contacts and a sense of themselves as warriors, a
theater reminiscent of Syria or Afghanistan for jihadis.

“The far right was not a priority for a long time," the European counterterror chief
said. “Now they are saying it's a real threat for all our societies. Now they are seeing
we have to handle it like Islamic terrorism. Now that we are sharing and we have a
bigger picture, we see it's really international, not domestic."

Galvanized

The assault on Congress signaled the start of a new era, experts said. The
convergence of a mix of extremist groups and activists solidi ed the idea that the
far-right threat has overtaken the Islamist threat in the United States, and that the
government has to change policies and shift resources accordingly. Experts predict
that the Biden administration will make global right-wing extremism a top
counterterrorism priority.

“This is on the rise and has gotten from nowhere on the radar to very intense in a
couple of years," a U.S. national security of cial said. “It is hard to see how it doesn't
continue. It will be a lot easier for U.S. of cials to get concerned where there is a
strong U.S. angle."

A previous spike in domestic terrorism took place in the 1990s, an era of violent
clashes between U.S. law enforcement agencies and extremists. In 1992, an FBI
sniper gunned down the wife of a white supremacist during an armed standoff in
Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The next year, four federal agents died in a raid on heavily armed
members of a cult in Waco, Texas; the ensuing standoff at the compound ended in a
re that killed 76 people.Both sieges played a role in the radicalization of the anti-
i h bl h kl h i f d l b ildi i 5
government terrorists who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995,
killing 168 people, including children in a day care center for federal employees.
Oklahoma City remains the deadliest terrorist act on U.S. soil aside from the Sept. 11
attacks.

The rise of al-Qaida in 2001 transformed the counterterrorism landscape, spawning

new laws and government agencies and a worldwide campaign by intelligence
agencies, law enforcement and the military. Despite subsequent plots and
occasionally successful attacks involving one or two militants, stronger U.S. defenses
and limited radicalization among American Muslims prevented Islamist networks
from hitting the United States with the kind of well-trained, remotely directed teams
that carried out mass casualty strikes in London in 2005, Mumbai in 2008 and Paris
in 2015.

During the past decade, domestic terrorism surged in the United States. Some of the
activity was on the political left, such as the gunman who opened re at a baseball
eld in Virginia in 2017. The attack critically wounded Rep. Steve Scalise, a
Republican legislator from Louisiana who was the House Majority whip, as well as a
Capitol Police of cer guarding him and four others.

But many indicators show that far-right extremism is deadlier. Right-wing attacks
and plots accounted for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the country between
1994 and 2020, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. The Anti-Defamation League reported in 2018 that right-wing terrorists
were responsible for more than three times as many deaths as Islamists during the
previous decade.

“There have been more arrests and deaths in the United States caused by domestic
terrorists than international terrorists in recent years," said Michael McGarrity, then
the counterterrorism chief of the FBI, in congressional testimony in 2019.
“Individuals af liated with racially-motivated violent extremism are responsible for
the most lethal and violent activity."

During the same testimony, McGarrity said the FBI dedicated only about 20% of its
counterterrorism resources to the domestic threat. The imbalance, experts say, was
partly a lingering result of the global offensive by the Islamic State, whose power
peaked in the middle of the decade. Another reason: Laws and rules instituted in the
1970s after FBI spying scandals make it much harder to monitor, investigate and
i d fd i i
prosecute Americans suspected of domestic extremism.

The Trump Administration and the Europeans

Critics say the Trump administration was reluctant to take on right-wing extremism.
The former president set the tone with his public statements about the violent Unite
the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they say, and with his call last
year telling the far-right Proud Boys group to “stand back and stand by."

Still, various agencies increased their focus on the issue because of a drumbeat of
attacks at home — notably the murders of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in
2018 — and overseas. The Christchurch massacre of worshippers at mosques in New
Zealand in March 2019 caught the attention of American of cials. It was a portrait of
the globalization of right-wing terrorism.

Brenton Tarrant, the 29-year-old Australian who livestreamed his attack, had
traveled extensively in Europe, visiting sites he saw as part of a struggle between
Christianity and Islam. In his manifesto, he cited the writings of a French ideologue
and of Dylann Roof, an American who killed nine people at a predominantly Black
church in South Carolina in 2015. While driving to the mosques, Tarrant played an
ode to Serbian nationalist ghters of the Balkan wars on his car radio. And he carried
an assault ri e on which he had scrawled the name of an Italian gunman who had
shot African immigrants in a rampage the year before.

Christchurch was “part of a wave of violent incidents worldwide, the perpetrators of

which were part of similar transnational online communities and took inspiration
from one another," said a report last year by Europol, an agency that coordinates law
enforcement across Europe. The report described English as “the lingua franca of a
transnational right-wing extremist community."

With its long tradition of political terrorism on both extremes, Europe has also
suffered a spike in right-wing violence. Much of it is a backlash to immigration in
general and Muslim communities in particular. Responding to assassinations of
politicians and other attacks, Germany and the United Kingdom have outlawed
several organizations.

Closer to home, Canada has banned two neo-Nazi groups, Blood and Honour and
Combat 18, making it possible to charge people for even possessing their
paraphernalia or attending their events. Concerts and sales of video games, T-shirts
paraphernalia or attending their events. Concerts and sales of video games, T shirts
and other items have become a prime source of international nancing for right-
wing movements, the European counterterror chief said.

During the past two years, of cials at the FBI, DHS, State Department and other
agencies tried to capitalize on the deeper expertise of European governments and
improve transatlantic cooperation against right-wing extremism. Legal and cultural
differences complicated the process, American and European of cials said. A lack of
order and cohesion in the U.S. national security community was another factor, they
said.

“There was so little organization to the U.S. counterterrorism community that

everybody decided for themselves what they would do," a U.S. national security
of cial said. “It was not the type of centrally controlled effort that would happen in
other administrations."

As a result, the U.S. government has sometimes been slow to respond to European
requests for legal assistance and information-sharing about far-right extremism, said
Eric Rosand, who served as a State Department counterterrorism of cial during the
Obama administration.

“U.S.-European cooperation on addressing white supremacist and other far-right

terrorism has been ad hoc and hobbled by a disjointed and inconsistent U.S.
government approach," Rosand said.

The semantic differences about what to call the threat didn't help, according to
Rosand and other critics. They say the Trump administration was averse to using the
phrase “right-wing terrorism" because some groups on that part of the ideological
spectrum supported the president.

“It highlights the disconnect," Rosand said. “They were saying they didn't want to
suggest the terrorism is linked to politics. They didn't want to politicize it. But if you
don't call it what it is because of concerns of how it might play with certain political
consistencies, that politicizes it."

Harnisch, the former deputy coordinator at the State Department counterterrorism

bureau, rejected the criticism. He said cooperation with Europeans on the issue was
“relatively nascent," but that there had been concrete achievements.

“I think we laid a strong foundation, and I think the Biden administration will build
 I think we laid a strong foundation, and I think the Biden administration will build
on it," Harnisch said. “From my perspective, we made signi cant progress on this
threat within the Trump administration."

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