White House seeks $100M to help fight domestic extremism

WASHINGTON — Biden administration officials released the first strategy to counter domestic terrorism on Tuesday, and highlighted how they have asked Congress for more money to tackle the rising problem.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department has started parts of the strategy, such as bolstering prosecutorial resources and prioritizing grants to law enforcement agencies that have communitybased approaches to combating racist violence and domestic terrorism.

Mr. Garland said in a speech that the Biden administration fiscal 2022 budget request asks for an additional $100 million for the Justice Department to support that effort to not only bring domestic terrorists to justice, but also stop attacks from happening.

“We cannot promise that we will be able to disrupt every plot, defuse every bomb or arrest every co-conspirator before they managed to wreak unspeakable horror,” Mr. Garland said. “But we can promise that we will do everything in our power to prevent such tragedies.”

Mr. Garland said he will reinvigorate the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee, an interagency body that then-Attorney General Janet Reno created after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Mr. Garland led the prosecution then and said it “required an enormous commitment of resources from agencies across the federal and state governments and demonstrated the importance of such a coordination mechanism.”

Mr. Garland pointed to more recent examples: the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol Building, the shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice four years ago this week, 11 Jewish worshippers shot and killed at their Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, and the shooting of 23 people, mostly Latino, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, two summers ago.

“Such attacks are not only unspeakable tragedies for the victims’ loved ones, they are also a tragedy for our country and an attack on our core ideals as a society,” Mr. Garland said. “We must not only bring our federal resources to bear, we must adopt a broader societal response to tackle the problem’s deeper roots.”