Emails show DHS officials desperate for Portland antifa plots as 2020 uprising took root
Top appointees were "looking for an angle to push," according to records obtained by FOIA
Listen to an audio version of this story here.
When President Trump tweeted a plan to subdue the nationwide uprising against police violence sparked by the murder of George Floyd, expert pundits scoffed. The White House lacked the authority, they said, to designate a domestic group like “ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” as Trump promised on May 31, 2020. Plus, there was no evidence of antifascist activists, or anyone else, orchestrating the spontaneous movement.
But top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) weren’t second-guessing the president’s authority, nor were they questioning his analysis. Agency emails sent hours before and after Trump’s Twitter declaration, which were obtained by a request made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), showed top officials vowing to employ counterterror tactics to break an imagined network of antifascist operations.
By July, DHS would be using the flimsy pretext of protecting federal property in Portland, Oregon to unleash U.S. security forces on the city, employing Dirty War-style tactics. DHS agents snatched people off the street and bundled them in unmarked cars, publicly circulated dossiers critical of journalists reporting on agency leaks, and brutalized peaceful demonstrators with clubs and so-called less lethal munitions. One nurse told The New York Times she joined the protest after treating: “an uptick of patients with injuries caused by rubber bullets and other police munitions. ‘People are coming in with their jaws falling off,’ she said.”
And the agency was gearing up for this brutality weeks beforehand in late May, the emails show, confirming prior reporting, including an inspector general audit criticizing the agency’s Portland operations as heavy-handed and politicized. One official, then-Acting DHS Chief of Staff John Gountanis, contributed to the discussion over how to respond to the unrest by using language like George W. Bush denouncing the 9/11-hijackers.
“This is a fight between good versus evil,” Gountanis said on May 30 in an email thread. “I don't mean to sound corny, but we need to be black and white on this issue.”
He added that he was “drafting [talking points] on the domestic terrorism front,” which resonated with Jameson Morgan, an aide to then-Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf. Morgan urged his colleagues “to be thinking about the DHS CT Framework and how it applies to this situation.” CT stands for counterterrorism in a law enforcement bureaucracy context.
Both men were adding their input after the agency’s press secretary, Alexei Woltornist, circulated a video of Trump for suggested use in a potential DHS tweet. In the clip, the president denounced “rioters, looters and anarchists.”
“The violence and vandalism is being lead by antifa, and other radical left-wing groups,” Trump asserted.
The conversation had been started by then-Acting Secretary Wolf who had cited a questionable claim passed from within the agency, on protesters allegedly hacking Portland police officers’ secure communications, to declare that demonstrators were becoming increasingly sophisticated.
“See below — protesters comprised [sic] encrypted radio comms,” Wolf said. “Looking for an angle to push — perhaps it's the fact that these folks are more organized, etc.”
Four days later, on June 3, 2020, the Portland Police Bureau sped up preexisting plans to encrypt its dispatch radio channels, in a move that received considerable criticism from city residents, generating local media coverage. Police officials said that they moved the dispatch channels to “already encrypted networks…used for sensitive information,” according to Oregon Public Broadcasting, and justified the move by citing concerns for officers’ safety amid growing protests, but made no mention of any contemporaneous attempts by protesters to access secure communications channels.
“Interested in what I can publicize quickly”
Much of the previous reporting critical of July 2020 DHS operations in Portland focused on an office within the agency called Intelligence & Analysis, or I&A, an outfit that’s supposed to rely on open source information to disseminate intelligence products on terrorist threats. By January 2021, the DHS inspector general would thoroughly criticize the head of I&A at the time of its Portland operations, Brian Murphy, for circulating the dossiers critical of journalists, and for attempting to direct intelligence gathering activities to pin the blame for all violence in Portland on antifascist anarchists.
The emails released by the agency bolster its watchdog’s criticism. On May 31, hours after Trump’s Twitter declaration, the I&A head said that he was certain of antifascists’ culpability in violent demonstrations, in a discussion with Ken Cuccinelli, the hardline conservative picked by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“The ANTIFA evidence is out there in quantity,” Murphy told Cuccinelli. “We are putting it together.”
“Thx. I will be particularly interested in what I can publicize quickly,” Cuccinelli replied.
The evidence never came. In October, after the uprising died down, the Associated Press examined thousands of court documents on federal cases related to the unrest in 2020, and found no documented antifa links:
…the only apparent mention of antifa is in a Boston case in which authorities said a FBI Gang Task Force member was investigating “suspected ANTIFA activity associated with the protests” when a man fired at him and other officers. Authorities have not claimed that the man accused of firing the shots is a member of antifa.
By June 9, well before the Trump administration ramped up its Portland crackdown, DHS officials privately fretted about the lack of documented antifa ties to nationwide violence. A public affairs official named Sofia Boza-Holman circulated an NPR report, which found no mention of antifa in an analysis of federal cases stemming from the unrest, sparking questions from other DHS officials.
“I was under the impression that we are just waiting for antifa cases to be filed. Is that no longer true?” Deputy Chief of Staff Tyler Houlton asked.
“Tyler, that's what I thought as well,” said Scott Erikson, another Deputy Chief of Staff. “At least that's what I&A has said recently. A dozen cases or so…”
I&A can at least claim that it tried—a little too hard, according to the DHS inspector general. On June 3, per the watchdog’s audit, Murphy’s division was preparing to assemble so-called “baseball cards” on arrested protesters including those not facing any charges for violent conduct. The information gathering tactic is usually reserved for known terrorists. By June 5, I&A was asking analysts to label protesters “‘anarchist extremist’ without sufficient facts to support such a characterization.” Analysts also complained about being ordered to collect information on people in the orbit of those arrested, through detainees’ online social network profiles.
I&A additionally sought to interrogate protesters in detention, the subject of a recent Politico article on legally-suspect DHS surveillance, and tried to exploit the cell phones of those arrested by both federal and local police. And even though nothing came up throughout these efforts, Murphy still insisted attributing all violent acts in Portland to anarchists and antifa, much to the chagrin of some subordinates. As the IG report put it:
This may have made sense to Mr. Murphy based on his own beliefs, but I&A did not have collections (evidence) to show it and absent reporting or some other evidence on motivation, I&A analysts could not ascribe motivation to the violent actors as Mr. Murphy expected. …For weeks, the analysts had been telling Mr. Murphy that because ANTIFA was not in the collection, it could not be put into the analysis. Notwithstanding this feedback…on July 25, 2020, Mr. Murphy sent an email to his senior leadership instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as [Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired] unless the intel “show[ed] . . . something different.”
Murphy was removed from his post five days later. He would claim that he was retaliated against for blowing the whistle on political appointees who had allegedly downplayed reports on Russian government interference in U.S. elections.
Murphy also defended his fixation on anarchists and antifa because “one person was murdered in Portland over political reasons,” he said, and the alleged killer, “Michael Forest Reinoehl, was a self-described member of antifa.”
Ironically, for an example used by Murphy to justify a forceful approach, Reinoehl was likely the victim of an extrajudicial execution, if the claims of President Trump himself are to be believed.
“We sent in the U.S. Marshals, took 15 minutes and it was over,” Trump said of the incident that ended in Reinoehl being fatally shot by law enforcement, despite making no threatening moves. “We got him,” Trump added. “They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him, and in 15 minutes that ended.”
When we filed this FOIA request, we asked for correspondence from May 1-June 12, 2020 involving any of the following top DHS officials at the time: Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli, John Gountanis, or Executive Secretary Clark Barrow. We asked the agency to produce email records responsive to searches for “antifa” or “boogaloo,” with the latter referring to far-right insurrectionists who want to start a second civil war.
There were no “boogaloo” emails produced by the agency, despite the fact that there had already been public reports detailing the boogaloo ties of Steven Carillo, who was eventually convicted of shooting and killing two people in Northern California on May 29, including a DHS contractor.
If you’d like to access the 39 pages of email records released to us by DHS, click here.
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