Federal Officers Are Still Struggling To Find Evidence Of A Massive Antifa Conspiracy
Donald Trump's lurid myths about bad hombres crossing the border to wreak havoc in the United States have failed to be ushered into existence by CBP and ICE. Try as they might, the two agencies have done little more than process a bunch of bog-standard illegal entries. And... um... target college students here legally. Numbers were fudged, but it has proven to be an exercise in futility. This attempt to villainize immigrants has been abandoned by both Trump and these DHS components.
Trump's new favorite enemy-of-America is "antifa." The president seems to believe antifa is a hierarchical organization capable of being crippled by intelligence gathering, strategic arrests, and the occasional extrajudicial killing. He's wrong about this as well. But that's not stopping the DHS and its protest-centered task forces from doing everything they can to prove some massive anti-facist conspiracy exists. This includes flying in FBI analysts and their tech to "exploit" data taken from arrestees' phones in hopes of finding some link between ongoing protests and Big Leftist.
All the money being spent in hopes of toppling an idea and prosecuting federal crimes isn't really accomplishing either of those tasks. As the AP reports, the feds aren't having any luck massaging Trump's antifa fever dreams into coherent shape. Nor are they really finding much federal crime to prosecute.
President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tell a different story.
Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs.
[...]
In thousands of pages of court documents, 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.
Some of those arrested by federal officers are more profa than antifa.
John Malcolm Bareswill, angry that a local Black church held a prayer vigil for George Floyd, called the church and threatened to burn it to the ground, using racial slurs in a phone call overheard by children, prosecutors said. Bareswill, 63, of Virginia Beach, faces 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to making a telephonic threat.
Two Missouri militia members who authorities say traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to see Trump's visit in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake were arrested at a hotel in September with a cache of guns, according to court documents. An attorney for one of the men, Michael Karmo, said he is charged criminally for conduct that many Americans would consider patriotic," as authorities have alleged his motive was to assist overwhelmed law enforcement.
There have been more than 300 arrests since this Trump-propelled charade began, but the feds are really stretching of the term "federal crime" to keep federal prosecutors in the mix. Arson (or attempted arson) isn't normally a federal charge but that makes up about a quarter of the fed's caseload. This allows the federal government to pursue sentences far harsher than those levied by states. In one case, the government's lawyers argued the attempted torching of a cop car required federal charges because the police car was "used in interstate commerce."
There's also a lot of miscellaneous garbage being treated as federal crime. Nearly a third of the cases deal with things like disorderly conduct, impeding a federal officer, failing to obey lawful orders, and obstructing law enforcement. There are more serious tangents to these charges (assaulting an officer, rioting) but these are often handy ways to bring criminal charges against people who fail to show officers the respect they feel they're owed. And "assaulting" an officer can mean something as harmless as pulling away from one when they try to grab you.
This zealousness to find an antifa link -- and keep cases federal for maximum vindictiveness -- has resulted in tragic absurdity.
A top federal prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump held a news conference this week to announce that the outstanding investigative work" of federal and state law enforcement officers had resulted in a federal felony charge against a 29-year-old bassist in an anarcho-punk band over a bag of weed.
An investigation was triggered after someone reported the bassist's staged photos of him carrying a mock molotov cocktail. These were supposed to be promo shots for his band, but he released them after the George Floyd killing. Law enforcement raided Justin Coffman's home in June. All they uncovered were a couple of legal guns, the fake molotov, and 24 grams of marijuana. Coffman was interrogated by the FBI after the raid. The agent questioning didn't seem too concerned officers had found a personal use amount of pot in the home. But the agent was very interested in Coffman's political beliefs. The FBI ultimately let the locals handle it. He was originally charged only with possession.
But the feds came back, apparently intent on making this anarcho-punk an example. The government brought federal gun charges against Coffman because it's illegal to own guns when you're a drug user. Those charges didn't stick but the state's creative "hoax device" charge did. That didn't stop the president from congratulating law enforcement for managing to turn nothing into some handy "we're taking apart antifa" propaganda.
This is your tax dollars working overtime to satisfy the cravings of an uninformed president content to traffic in conspiracy theories. And it's a handy way to deter future protests against police brutality. But it does nothing to make the country safer or serve the people paying for it.