Liberal Cities Like Seattle May Help Trump Crush Their Own, Pentagon Studied Information Warfare Targeting U.S. Citizens in Portland
On September 22 President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” Three days later, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), squarely taking aim at the political ideologies of anti-fascism, placing any so-called threads of anti-American, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-Christianity, and “hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality,” squarely in the crosshairs of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF).
As Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons told Mother Jones, “the national security state is a wonderful tool for a skilled authoritarian to crush American democracy.” However, oddly enough, liberal cities like Seattle can choose whether or not to participate.
There are three points that I want to cover here:
- The Seattle Police Department (SPD) flippantly throws around the word “antifa” like its air. That's reckless.
- Trump’s NSPM-7 has implications for the use of the U.S. military against U.S. citizens.
- The FBI JTTF is staffed with SPD officers. There are legal issues here and also choices to be made by the Mayor.
“Antifa”
Lets first start with how casually the SPD uses the term “antifa.” In June of this year, an SPD commander ordered officers to “start pushing these antifa” at an anti-ICE protest in downtown Seattle.
As far as I can tell, the SPD has no official memo or procedure for how the term should be used. Neither SPD nor Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office responded when I asked how the SPD defines “antifa.”
During the 2020 protests, the FBI blasted intelligence reports to hundreds of local law enforcement officers with updates like “Antifa in crowd according to JTTF” and “Report of Antifa using gas (NFI) [no further information].” The King County Sheriff's Office reported that “Antifa is coordinating 'mutual aid efforts.'” SPD Chief Carmen Best forwarded an email labeling a major, well known, public activist as “antifa” to the department’s intelligence team. One SPD commander wrote in an email, “Someone forwarded this from an Antifa webpage. Not sure of the original source.”
One SPD officer told Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability in an interview that “most of the protesters that night, I think, were just kind of Antifa members.” No evidence or explanation was given.
SPD circulated an officer safety bulletin labeling a single person “ANTIFA” without describing what specific actions or activity was used to justify the descriptor. SPD made clear that no probable cause existed to arrest the ANTIFA individual in the bulletin.
In an SPD police report, one officer wrote that "'ACAB' is a well-known acronym, commonly used by Antifa and other anti-policing groups, that means 'All Cops Are Bastards.'"
One SPD record from 2020 labeled a widely known public figure in Seattle “antifa” without any evidence. To the thousands of people who know this person, the accusation is laughably absurd.
In one case in 2020, SPD officers received a tip from the University of Washington police that “antifa” was planning a protest in Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood. Turns out it was a Laurelhurst in a totally different state.
Despite the veracity of “antifa” intelligence, the SPD gained a reputation across the country. So much so that a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) intelligence unit deputy reached out in 2020 “in an attempt to obtain information regarding the ANTIFA movement.”
Today, the flippant use of “antifa” could be used to unlock extraordinary and invasive surveillance collection by the FBI.
In addition, the right wing rhetoric surrounding antifa, as a bandit group of terrorists hellbent on destroying our home of the free, has inspired some citizens to take matters into their own hands.
In 2020, numerous threats to life were made by individuals who threatened to kill “antifa” in Seattle. The FBI and SPD know about these threats because they are documented in their own reports.
One guy, who was later investigated by SPD and the FBI, announced a “HUNTING trip to DEM CITIES to track down and shoot BLM/ ANTIFA/ ANARCHIST/ MARXIST rioters and DEMonstrators.”
While playing a video game online, someone was sent messages in 2020, saying “I’m going to seattlemto [sic] kill antifa… Im going to shoot them in the face and then chop their heads off.” The information was passed directly to SPD’s intelligence team.
Despite the rhetoric, threats and violent acts, Trump’s Justice Department recently deleted a study showing that domestic terrorists are most often right wing.
The flippant use of “antifa” is twofold, people who support equal human rights may find themselves squeezed on two sides, under invasive surveillance by the FBI and SPD or under the fist of private citizens intent on enforcing racial supremacy through thuggery and violence, while law enforcement takes a step back. A third hybrid scenario also manifested in 2020, where SPD broadcast fake threats of racially motivated violence from right wing actors in order to try and coerce protesters into going home.
Military Force Authorization
Trump’s NSPM-7 also has implications for Pentagon deployments targeting U.S. citizens.
The U.S. Department of Defense [DOD] instructions for supporting American police state that “DoD personnel may be made available to a Federal law enforcement agency to operate or assist in operating equipment, to the extent the equipment is used in a supporting role, with respect to:… A foreign or domestic counter-terrorism operation, including support of FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces.”
There are fluid relationships between the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon. In some cases, the FBI has openly violated policy by accessing dragnet warrantless surveillance operations run under Section 702.
In the 1960s, the Pentagon used 1,000 plainclothes agents to spy on U.S. citizens, dragnetting 18,000 targets. With social media now, the military can monitor millions of Americans’ political views and analyze connections through social network analysis.
Today, President Trump said he is sending the U.S. military into Portland Oregon “to protect [the] War ravaged” city.
Beyond boots on the ground, the Pentagon has openly studied the potential use of psychological operations (PsyOps) on U.S. citizens, using Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 as a test case.
This revelation was published by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in a 2021 article within Special Warfare Magazine authored by three active duty soldiers serving in the Army’s 95th Civil Affairs Brigade.
The three soldiers posed an extraordinary question: “is America in the early stages of armed insurgency?” They proposed that "U.S. Forces must anticipate and exploit the information environment to deter aggression in the homeland," implying that U.S. military PsyOps may intend to target Americans on U.S. soil in the future.
The soldiers wrote that a "joint force should adopt a similar approach to our competitors. This approach includes information campaigns to exploit partisan disputes based on abuses towards marginalized groups, such as human rights violations against minority sects of a population."
The soldiers identified American protests as a potential national security risk, "demonstrating failed leadership," in the face of nation state enemies like Russia and China. “It is time for the U.S. Military to focus on the competition space away from a conventional battlefield and ensure the military is prepared to engage with other large scale nations,” they wrote. “ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] has the right tools to innovate and lead as the force of choice for the United States to compete.”
Who knows if Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth will authorize PsyOps against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil?
A Pentagon anti-COVID19 vaccine PsyOp in the Philippines was exposed last year by Reuters, highlighting how the U.S. military needlessly put countless people's lives at risk to advance Pentagon objectives against China.
While Trump has openly sent uniformed soldiers into American cities, the point here is that military intervention against U.S. citizens could spread into the information environment through the use of ARSOF in lieu of or in addition to boots on the ground.
If you read Seth Harp's riveting book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, you'll learn that ARSOF are capable of just about anything you can imagine.
FBI and SPD Coordination
Trump’s NSPM-7 explicitly identifies the use of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) to investigate anti-fascism.
The FBI has extraordinary investigative powers, including using 2703(d) orders to obtain data without probable cause through secret (sealed) court orders. The FBI merely needs to establish that there is a nexus to a criminal investigation to establish the legality of a 2703(d) order. The implications here are immense, and could result in widescale subscriber data collection dragnets.
According to the FBI, JTTFs “are cells of highly trained and locally based investigators, analysts, linguists, SWAT experts, and other specialists from dozens of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” That includes agencies like SPD and the King County Sheriff.
During the 2020 protests two SPD officers were detailed to FBI JTTF units that were actively gathering and coordinating intelligence collection on the Seattle protests.
One SPD officer, Rik Hall, who was assigned to the FBI JTTF during the 2020 protests at one point urged SPD to remove their officers from a growing protest crowd of over 10,000 people. Hall eventually quit SPD after I submitted a public records request for text messages he sent during the 2020 protests. SPD said that they could not locate any.
There are serious transparency and public records implications for SPD FBI task force officers. SPD employees are paid by the city, but communicate using an assigned FBI email, rendering it almost impossible for taxpayers to obtain public records of their communications. Try FOIA’ing records and you’ll need an attorney to take the request to court.
As of August, there are seven SPD officers assigned to an SPD unit nebulously named “Special Investigations And Assignments Squad” that details officers to the FBI JTTF, the ATF, and other roles.
During the 2020 protests, SPD and the FBI Safe Streets Task Force (SSTF) operated at least one informant who infiltrated the protests to collect intelligence.
Former FBI Agent Mike German wrote the book on policing white supremacy. More recently, he wrote that local partnerships with federal law enforcement should be scrutinized and examined closely. Days before Trump labeled antifa a domestic terrorism threat, German wrote a policy brief for the Brennan Center for Justice, highlighting that city law enforcement and elected politicians can suspend partnerships with the FBI and state fusion centers when they fail to be transparent, mutually beneficial, or pose threats to their own constituents.
I shared German’s policy brief with Seattle Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson’s campaign and asked if she is considering any changes to Seattle’s federal law enforcement partnerships if elected. I did not receive a response.
After Trump’s latest salvo of memos and executive orders, SPD officers detailed to the FBI may be explicitly told to investigate a political ideology of anti-fascism or anti-capitalism. However, Seattle’s Human Rights law explicitly states the city’s policy to police the public free from restrictions on political ideology. So far, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has not indicated he has any problems with Seattle’s FBI partnerships, nor offered any explanation for how SPD defines the term “antifa.”