Domestic terrorism investigations have tripled in five years

Is the threat of terrorism actually greater?

The number of domestic terrorism investigations in the United States has more than tripled in five years, according to the latest FBI numbers, to 2,700. And for the first time investigations categorized as anti-government and anti-authority equal or outnumber investigations of white supremacists, according to FBI documents and government specialists. 

Domestic terrorism investigations currently are open in all 50 states and in all 56 FBI field offices. The vast majority of new cases are related to January 6th with more than 850 alleged law breakers already indicted or arrested. 

FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on November 17 and revealed the current number. 

“Individuals based and operating primarily within the United States or its territories without direction or inspiration from a foreign terrorist group or other foreign power who seek to further political or social goals, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence are described as DVEs [domestic violent extremists]” Wray told the Committee. 

The DVE label, like domestic terrorism itself, is convoluted. It was adapted to mirror the already existing “homegrown violent extremist” (HVE) label for those taking direction from ISIS or other foreign groups. Within the umbrella of DVEs are other acronyms that the FBI says are the greatest current threats, specifically Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVEs) and Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists (AGAAVEs). The latter group includes everyone from militias to Antifa and other anarchists (MVEs and AVEs). The Justice Department says that “AAGVEs have specifically targeted law enforcement and the military as well as institutions or members of the U.S. Government.” 

Traditionally, the FBI has classified domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism. In March 2021, Wray told a Congressional oversight committee looking in the January 6th investigation that the threat of domestic terrorism is “metastasizing across the country.” In a November 13, 2021 letter to Congress, the FBI said: “We are … increasingly seeing terrorism threats that do not fall neatly into categories: a growing number of subjects are individuals who are ascribing to blended or mixed ideologies, or even individualized belief systems, to justify their desire to commit violence.” 

Just how many domestic terrorist investigations have there been? Here’s a timeline of the recent data (since Wray became FBI director): 

• September 27, 2017: Wray says that the FBI has about 1,000 open investigations into “potential domestic terrorists.”

• September 10, 2018: Wray says that there are about 5,000 terrorism investigations worldwide, of which about 1,000 relate to homegrown violent extremists and an equal number relates to domestic terrorists.

• May 8, 2019: FBI assistant director Michael C. McGarrity says that there are about 850 domestic terrorism investigations, a curious reduction that might reflect the new vibe of the Trump administration.

• August 2020: Wray says that the FBI has “roughly 1,000 domestic terrorism investigations a year. It’s higher than that this year…A good bit north of 1,000 this year.”

• March 2021: After January 6th, Wray says “In terms of domestic violent extremism, domestic terrorism, that number now has grown steadily on my watch. So, we’ve increased the number of domestic terrorism investigations from around 1,000 or so when I got here, up to about 1,400 at the end of last year [2020], to about 2,000 now.”

• November 13, 2021: The FBI, in a letter to Congress says that the FBI has “DT investigations in all 50 states across all 56 of our Field Offices.”

• January 11, 2022: Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen says that the number of FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremists has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.

• September 21, 2022: Wray says that “Since the spring of 2020—so the past 16, 18 months or so—we’ve more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload, from about a thousand to around 2,700 investigations. And we’ve surged personnel to match, more than doubling the number of people working that threat from a year before.” 

“During President Biden’s first week in office,” Attorney General Merrick Garland says, “he directed the Administration to undertake an assessment of the domestic terrorism threat.” That assessment, coming on the heels of January 6, concluded that DVEs “pose an elevated threat to the Homeland.” 

The number of investigations, Garland said, proved this hypothesis of an elevated threat, that since the Capitol protests and riot, the number of open FBI domestic terrorism investigations had increased “significantly.” 

Not only did the Biden administration direct the production of the first National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism but the Department of Justice issued new guidance to the FBI on improving their reporting and tracking of domestic terrorism investigations (that led to an increase in numbers). The Department of Homeland Security, not to be outdone, conducted its own Counterterrorism and Targeted Violence Posture Review, increasing its own domestic terrorism investigations, particularly against people who constituted a threat to “critical infrastructure,” including election systems.

According to internal FBI numbers I obtained, Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism was considered the prime threat (and dominated investigations) in 2019. That shifted to Anti-Government and Anti-Authority Violent Extremism in 2020. After January 6th, anti-government extremism continued to be the top threat and in late 2021 the number of anti-government domestic terrorism investigations surpassed the number of racially-motivated investigations for the first time. 

The FBI says that it distinguishes between protest and “first amendment” activity and domestic terrorism, making sure that the threat of or the use of violence is the predicate for an investigation. “We can never open an investigation based solely around protected First Amendment rights, a FBI senior official said at a background briefing in February 2021. “We cannot and do not investigate ideology. We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security.”

 “The FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms,” Wray said in March 2021.  

Assistant Attorney General Olsen reiterated this point in January this year, saying that “It is important to emphasize that we investigate and prosecute domestic violent extremists for their criminal acts, not for their beliefs or based on their associations.”

But associations exactly track with FBI thinking, in two ways. First, as a legacy organization, organized crime has always dominated, and post-9/11, there have been 20-plus years of mapping and chasing al Qaeda, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, ISIS and other organized groups, the so-called “networks.” The FBI pretty much said this in its November 13, 2021 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that the Bureau “conducts comprehensive [domestic terrorism] investigations that build out criminal or terrorist networks to determine who is involved in the criminal activity and identify co-conspirators.” In other words, organizations, associations, and conspiracies are in FBI blood.

Second, associations mean family and friends according to FBI documents. A key part of post-January 6th investigative activities has been to look in associates of known and suspected terrorists, and to follow threads of family and friend associations (particularly on social media) scouting for links.

Another post-9/11 principle applied to domestic terrorism that is increasingly determining who to newly investigate is to stop crimes (terrorism acts) before they happen. In some ways, that is intrinsic in looking at conspiracies, this pre-crime focus. But after 9/11, the investigative (and warfare) paradigm shifted to dealing with terrorism before it happens, not just being content with investigating after an attack. This has been the entire career focus of most FBI agents and intelligence analysts, and how that paradigm is being applied to domestic terrorism is a big unknown.

“Non-violent protests are signs of a healthy democracy, not an ailing one,” FBI director Wray said in March 2021, addressing concerns in Congress that the Bureau was increasingly scrutinizing right-wing activists. There’s little evidence that the FBI is focused on any political side of the spectrum; it really does endeavor to stick to violence wherever it may originate. The FBI can’t answer the question about whether the political activity of some is more prone to violence than others.

 In the topsy turvy world we live in, there is no doubt that “anti-government” and “anti-authority” has become the domain of the right (rather than the left, say in the Vietnam and Reagan eras). That’s the most profound shift going on in society. The FBI, Boy Scouts that they are, has no opinion on what that means. But as the public face of the federal government’s increasing focus on domestic terrorism, the FBI is undeniably Washington’s enforcer.