How Trump DHS Officials Invented An Anti-Antifascist Conspiracy In Portland

Surprise?

About a year ago, US Sen. Ron Wyden (D- Oregon) released an internal Department of Homeland Security report detailing how the Department's officials, including Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and Acting Under Secretary for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Brian Murphy desperately worked to exploit the 2020 George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon, in order to create and promote a narrative of the city being "under siege" by evil agents of Antifa.

At the time, though damning, the report was heavily redacted — but thanks to Sen. Wyden's efforts, it has now been unredacted so that we may see the full extent of the DHS's malfeasance during this time.

“Oregonians had a right to get a full accounting of the Trump Administration’s twisted efforts to provoke violence in Portland for his political gain,” Wyden said. “Now the public knows much more about how political DHS officials spied on Oregonians for exercising their First Amendment right to protest and justified it with baseless conspiracy theories. Undersecretary [Kenneth] Wainstein deserves credit for following through on his commitment to me to review the last administration’s unnecessary redactions and release these important details.”

“The report documents shocking, coordinated efforts by our government to abuse its power and to invade liberty in violation of the Constitution,” said Oregon federal public defender Lisa Hay. “In Portland, we were concerned that the government unconstitutionally collected information, including through the illegal search of protestors’ cellphones last summer. This report confirms that was their intent.”

During the summer of 2020, people across the country were protesting the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — protests which were largely peaceful, but which because of a few incidents of looting and window smashing here and there were characterized as terrifying and violent, largely by Republicans and rightwing media. The protests in Portland, a notoriously leftwing city that had for the last several years been the site of clashes between anti-fascist activists and rightwing street gangs like the Proud Boys, were particularly well-attended.

In hopes of exploiting this and general fear of "Antifa," the Trump administration sent the Department of Homeland Security down to Portland to, well, exacerbate things.

But there was one big problem — the situation they had hoped to exploit in Portland didn't actually exist and so they had to invent it. Literally.

Sick and tired of being told that Antifa was not an actual organization, because of how it is not an actual organization, Acting Under Secretary for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Brian Murphy, whose name had previously been redacted, demanded that the office stop referring to people who caused problems during the protests as "violent opportunists" and instead as “Violent Antifa Anarchists Inspired” or "VAAI," a term which probably only makes sense to someone who doesn't know what any of those words mean or how to link words together in general.

This was both a grammatical and factual mistake, since it did turn out that the vast majority of violence at these protests across the nation was not caused by antifascist activists, but that it was frequently caused by far-right groups .

Via the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Operations in Portland report:

As discussed by several intelligence analysts, to understand the genesis for VAAI, one must take the events of the summer into context. In many conversations, Mr. Murphy stated that the violent protesters in Portland were connected to or motivated by ANTIFA. 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. Mr. Murphy would tell the analysts to cite to existing OSIRs [Open Source Intelligence Reports] as evidence of the motivation, but the OSIRs did not draw a connection to ANTIFA.

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 from the I&A analysts, 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 VAAI, unless the intel “show[ed] . . . something different.”

The analysts stated that “if you lived through the process, you could see where this VAAI definition was coming from a mile away. He got tired of the analysts telling him they did not have the reporting and he was convinced it was ANTIFA so he was going to fix the problem by changing what the collectors were reporting.”

So, to be clear, this guy didn't have the evidence he wanted so he demanded that those underneath him invent it for him so that he could get out there and say "It's ANTIFA! The city is under siege by ANTIFA! Leftwing activists are scary and dangerous, especially when they oppose fascism!" (Not, as far as we know, a direct quote.)

According to the report, “the analysts were concerned with the VAAI definition because it potentially created attribution where there was none, which would then affect the analysis. You can’t pencil whip attribution.”

In addition to this nonsense, DHS officials planned to create Operational Background Reports (known colloquially as "baseball cards") for everyone — thousands of people — who attended the protest. While this did not end up happening, they did create these reports on a number of those who were arrested for literally anything at the protests, violent or non-violent, that included "past criminal history, travel history, derogatory information from OHS or Intelligence Community holdings, as well as any relevant publicly available social media potentially relevant to identifying indicators of domestic violent extremism or coordination among violent actors."

Analysts were pressured by Murphy and others to find "links" between these people as proof of an overarching antifa conspiracy to ... do something evil.

Of the 48 "baseball card" reports, 13 were about people who got in trouble for trespassing or something else that had nothing to do with anything that might conceivably be an issue of homeland security. One was of a journalist accused of "flying a drone."

In one case, CETC prepared an OBR on an USPER whose social media profile clearly identified the individual as a journalist. This individual was arrested for flying a drone in a national defense airspace. The arrestee’s purpose for flying this drone was not identified in the OBR – it may have been for the purpose of capturing photographs of the ongoing activities or for some other reason – and as such it is unclear whether this OBR was a valid exercise of I&A’s legal authority. In another instance, an I&A employee requested a report on another journalist – the same journalist at issue in one of the leaked OSIRs – and included instructions to add “a list of any [of his] associates or groups.” The journalist in that case had not been arrested for anything, but had posted unclassified DHS internal correspondence to his social media page. In addition to poor optics, completing an OBR on this journalist without a clear connection to a national or departmental mission arguably would have failed to satisfy the reasonable belief standard. Fortunately, a collector recognized that the subject was a journalist, alerted the requestor to this fact, and declined to proceed with that particular search. But the facts of this particular incident suggest that at least some I&A personnel did not understand the relevant legal standard before running checks on USPERs.

The whole entire purpose of this was to justify the violence against protestors by federal agents as well as to create a narrative of "scary ANTIFA and BLM activists" that Donald Trump was able to exploit for his own purposes — namely scaring people into believing that these activists were coming for them .

Murphy also invented a ridiculous theory about how protests work and then asked analysts to create evidence that this theory was true:

A second example of the manner in which Mr. Murphy turned analysis upside down was his dictate regarding the “Four Phases of Protest.” Apparently, Mr. Murphy came to the conclusion sometime after George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests that four phases of protest exist, and he wanted to say, at least temporarily, whether a protest was in a particular phase, and the indicators of that phase. As with the VAAI term, Mr. Murphy devised this idea about phases of protest on his own. From the analysts’ perspective, the problem was that they were typically asked to investigate a question, not given a conclusion and told to write a paper to support it. In this case, Mr. Murphy gave the analysts the four phases and told them to find support for his proposition. Aggravating the task, they were given 48 hours over a weekend so the paper could be sent to state and local partners. By requiring an artificial timeline for a product no one outside I&A had asked for, the analysts could only conduct superficial analysis, finding that the protests were all cyclical – that they could go either way, and the progression envisioned by Mr. Murphy did not occur in any predictable manner. A protest could be in Phase III and drop back to Phase II. At any rate, the paper was sent to state and local officials, where it was greeted like “a tree that fell in the forest that no one heard.”

BURN.

It's clear that Murphy was under a lot of pressure to make it look like Trump and his acolytes were not delusional, to give them reason to believe that antifa was not merely an umbrella term for anti-fascist activists but rather ANTIFA, a highly organized domestic terrorism group seeking to destroy the American way of life and bus scary looking protesters to a street corner near you. In fact, Murphy actually issued a whistleblower complaint last year saying that he was also pressured to inflate the numbers of "terrorists" crossing the border while also downplaying the threat of rightwing terrorist threats during his tenure at the DHS.

But pressure isn't an excuse to violate anyone's civil liberties or to invent a conspiracy out of whole cloth to justify federal violence against civilians and mollify the president. He wasn't legally obligated to do any of this. He did it anyway. Hopefully there are some consequences.

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