A third evening of peaceful protests in downtown Portland adds evidence to the argument that it was the actions of federal agents, not demonstrators, that predominantly fueled the violence around the federal courthouse over the past few weeks. It was not at all assured that the feds would keep off the streets, as acting secretary of Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf hedged the withdrawal plan struck with Governor Kate Brown with multiple conditions. Moreover, the federal backdown came days after plans to send even more federal agents to the city.
Yet it is looking increasingly likely that various damning realities finally penetrated the consciousness of decision-makers in the Trump administration: that the federal deployment had created a political backlash harmful to the president, and that the agents were caught in a contradictory mission of both fomenting violence while not wanting violence to reach a level such that it appeared they could not do their official job of keeping the peace. Did it finally occur to someone in the chain of command that an agent from CBP or the Marshals Service was going to end up killing a demonstrator on the streets of Portland, and saw that this wouldn’t benefit even a president determined to show his toughness to political enemies? I don’t think we have the full story of why the feds retreated, but I hope we do sooner rather than later, as it will provide important insights into the scope and potential limits of the depravity Trump’s henchmen are willing to enact.
Several days ago, The New York Times reported on how some senior federal law enforcement officials immediately saw danger in the social justice protests that exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, and advocated a federal response to the demonstrations. Such figures include the FBI’s deputy director, David Bowdich, who wrote a memo implicitly comparing the violence on the streets to 9/11 and making it clear that he saw the demonstrations as an example of organized violence. That is, in the midst of the greatest social justice awakening of the past half century, high-ranking security officials believed the United States itself to be under organized attack.
Apart from the insanity of not being able to see what was plain for the ordinary citizen — that the protests around the nation were overwhelmingly peaceful — federal security agencies could not seem to figure out who was actually doing all this purported organizing of violence. The Times notes that “domestic intelligence agents are uncertain about the root causes” of incidents, such as when some protestors shot fireworks at the federal courthouse in Portland, and that efforts were made to tie such acts to “anarchist extremists” committing “violence against government personnel and facilities” in the Pacific Northwest over the past several years.
The insistence that an organized violent assault on the United States was underway seems to have had several pernicious results, apart from the most obvious one of leading U.S. security agencies to deny the reality of an actual peaceful social justice movement by focusing on limited fringe activities. It seems not to have occurred to anyone, or to enough people, that low-grade events like shooting fireworks can easily be the work of individuals; after all, lighting a fireworks fuse is hardly what we mean by “rocket science.” The obsession with a phantom organized effort at violence has also led the federal government to bring charges against protestors for low-level crimes that would normally be handled locally, such as smashing a police car window and burning a parking-attendant booth. Apart from constituting federal overreach, this might be seen as federal prosecutors attempting to gin up an impression of a nationwide conspiracy requiring a federal response; after all, why else would the feds be involved in a case literally involving a broken window? Finally, the close alignment between federal security officials viewing protests as an existential threat to the United States, and President Trump’s ongoing attempt to characterize the Black Lives Matter protests as a hate movement, suggests a corrupt federal adoption of the president’s deranged and frankly white supremacist rhetoric.
Further strong support for the theory that federal security efforts around civil rights protests have gone off the rails came on Thursday, with news that, according to The Washington Post, “The Department of Homeland Security has compiled ‘intelligence reports’ about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.” Tweets by two journalists were included in intelligence reports that “are not intended to disseminate information about American citizens who have no connection to terrorists or other violent actors and who are engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment.” On top of this, one of the leaked memos indicated that intelligence officials were creating “‘baseball cards’ of arrested protestors to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.” Strikingly, the next day, acting secretary Wolf removed the DHS official whose office wrote these reports, and “ordered the intelligence office to stop collecting information on journalists and announced an investigation into the matter.”
We are likely to learn of more DHS abuses in the coming weeks and months, the logical outcome of an agency that can’t discern true threats from false ones, is institutionally compelled to treat even protestors as dangerous terrorists, and seems all too attentive to the inclinations of an authoritarian president.