DHS Draft Document: White Supremacists are Greatest Terror Threat

Since launching his campaign in 2015 Donald Trump has always played to the far right and white supremacists in particular.  After the events in Charlottesville in 2017 Trump described the largely out of state Neo-Nazi's and white supremacists who invade this Virginia city as "very fine people."  To this day, the vast majority of residents of Charlottesville - I have family that lives there - will vehemently tell you otherwise.   Now, while Trump is fabricating stories of plane loads of agitators being behind unrest in some American cities, drafts of Home Land Security reports on domestic terror threats suggests that if there are any agitators seeking to ignite violence, they are likely Trump supporting white supremacists groups and heavily armed "militias" not aggrieved protesters in the streets.  None of this is new news even though much of the media has not given the domestic terror threat sufficient coverage.  An article in Politico looks at drafts of the DHS report.  Note the disinterest of the White House in countering the threat.  Why?  Because this is a key part of Trump's base. Here are story highlights:

White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security.

Two later draft versions of the same document — all of which were reviewed by POLITICO — describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language. But all three drafts describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.

“Foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for Homeland attacks but probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year,” all three documents say.

Russia “probably will be the primary covert foreign influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in the Homeland,” the documents also say.

Former acting DHS Sec. Kevin McAleenan last year directed the department to start producing annual homeland threat assessments. POLITICO reviewed three drafts of this year’s report — titled DHS’s State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020 — all of which were produced in August. Ben Wittes, the editor in chief of the national security site Lawfare, obtained the documents and shared them with POLITICO. The first such assessment has not been released publicly, and a DHS spokesperson declined to comment on “allegedly leaked documents,” and on when the document will be made public.

None of the drafts POLITICO reviewed referred to a threat from Antifa, the loose cohort of militant left-leaning agitators who senior Trump administration officials have described as domestic terrorists. Two of the drafts refer to extremists trying to exploit the “social grievances” driving lawful protests.

John Cohen, who oversaw DHS’s counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts’ conclusion isn’t surprising.

“This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white supremacy and other far-right ideological causes,” he said.

“Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists – who increasingly are networking with likeminded persons abroad – will pose the most persistent and lethal threat.”

“We judge that ideologically-motivated lone offenders and small groups will pose the greatest terrorist threat to the Homeland through 2021, with white supremacist extremists presenting the most lethal threat,” it reads.

“Among DVE [domestic violent extremist] actors, WSEs [white supremacist extremists] conducted half of all lethal attacks (8 of 16), resulting in the majority of deaths (39 of 48),” the drafts read.

The assessment comes as DHS has faced scrutiny for its response to increasingly violent domestic extremism during the Trump era. Top DHS officials have spent years grappling with how to do more to combat the threat, and long chafed at what they called disinterest from the White House. Two former top DHS political appointees told POLITICO last month that White House national security officials shied away from addressing the problem and didn’t want to refer to killings by right-wing extremists as domestic terrorism.

Current DHS leaders also have acknowledged the lethality of white supremacist extremists.

“I have no qualms criticizing the white supremacy threat,” said Ken Cuccinelli, DHS’s second-in-command, in a recent interview on MSNBC. “Neither does the secretary, neither does the Department of Homeland Security. We recognize when those people act out violently, that they show the highest level of lethality, meaning if you compare the number of violent incidents to the numbers of deaths, the numbers of deaths relative to the incidents is very high compared to other types of threats."

That even Cuccinelli - a/k/a Kookinelli here in Virginia - admits the reality of the threat speaks volumes as to its seriousness.