Critics: U.S. long ignored far-right extremists
On June 3, 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder restarted a long-dormant domestic terrorism task force created after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. A former Ku Klux Klan leader had just murdered three people near a Jewish Community Center in a Kansas City suburb and yelled “Heil Hitler” as police took him into custody.
For too long, Holder said, the federal government had narrowly focused on Islamist threats and had lost sight of the “continued danger we face” from violent farright extremists.
But three years later, it is unclear what, if anything the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee has done, despite expectations that its reanimation would better focus efforts throughout the Justice Department to disrupt and detect plots in a more centralized way, as was already being done by the department and FBI when it came to hunting Islamist terrorists.
As President Donald Trump continues to suffer political backlash for his response to the deadly Charlottesville, Va., protests led by white supremacists, analysts who follow far-right groups say generations of neglect by multiple administrations has allowed them to proliferate and strengthen.
“The federal government has taken their eye off the ball, and it has allowed the far right to fester and grow for decades,” said Heidi Beirich, who leads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and runs its Hatewatch blog. “They are a real threat that has been underestimated.”
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the domestic terrorism task force was due to convene for a regular meeting. It never happened, and the group remained dormant for more than a decade.
The 9/11 attacks were transformative for the federal government, nowhere more so than at the Justice Department and the FBI. The agencies made counterterrorism their chief concern, pouring billions of dollars into the effort to sniff out terrorist plots before they could be executed.
The FBI’s aggressive and preventive posture meant terrorism dominated the Justice Department’s agenda, but when they talked about plots, officials were focused on those inspired by radical Islamist ideologies, not anti-government or hate groups.
But far-right violence remained a significant issue. Since 9/11, there have been 95 deaths in the United States linked to Islamist militant violence, while 68 people have died at the hands of the far right during the same time, according to the nonpartisan think tank New America.
Just months before 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others were injured in Charlottesville, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin that said white supremacists “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement.”
Federal authorities are also dealing with an emerging problem from an increasingly confrontational and sometimes violent leftist extremist group known as antifa. Homeland Security officials said members of the loosely organized group are “antifascist, anti-government extremists.” And their membership and demonstrations have spiked in recent months in response to activities organized by violent white supremacists, such as the Charlottesville rally. But most of the money and manpower to combat terrorism — even under the Obama administration after Holder warned of the danger of far-right extremism — has centered on preventing threats posed by Islamist extremists.
“They never really focused on neo-Nazis and the far right,” said Seamus Hughes, a former lead staffer at the National Counterterrorism Center and deputy director at George Washington University’s program on extremism. “The Obama administration was very good at messaging, but if you actually looked at their programs, it was always a secondary thought.”