Supporters of former President Donald Trump are not being paranoid when complaining about “the feds” coming for them.
It turns out President Joe Biden’s FBI is, in fact, specifically targeting MAGA nation for their political beliefs.
The evidence can be found in a Newsweek article from Wednesday, which reported that the FBI “has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.”
While the FBI maintains publicly that its mission “is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations,” Newsweek was privy to classified data that showed “the vast majority of its current ‘anti-government’ investigations are of Trump supporters.”
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In its own defense, the FBI told Newsweek that the threat posed by domestic violent extremists is “persistent, evolving, and deadly.”
“The FBI’s goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence,” the statement said. “Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI’s top threat priorities.”
“We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person’s political beliefs or affiliations,” the agency added.
But Newsweek revealed that is not true.
The outlet cited a report the FBI sent to Congress in June. In that report, the FBI clearly stated that “sociopolitical developments … will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence” ahead of the 2024 election.
Those “developments” include “narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence,” Newsweek noted. “The threats listed in that paragraph are all clearly associated with America’s right and in particular with Trump’s MAGA supporters.”
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Newsweek reported that the FBI issued another report that revised the definition of AGAAVE (“anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism”) from “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.”
“For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics,” Newsweek noted. “It was a subtle change, little noticed, but a gigantic departure for the Bureau.”
How so?
“Trump and his army of supporters were acknowledged as a distinct category of domestic violent extremists, even as the FBI was saying publicly that political views were never part of its criteria to investigate or prevent domestic terrorism,” Newsweek reported.
Yet the FBI ramped up its anti-Trump rhetoric in October 2022 by creating a subcategory called AGAAVE-Other,” or those considered a threat but who are not anarchists, militia types, or Sovereign Citizens.
This new classification officially defined domestic violent extremists as those who “cite anti-government or anti-authority motivations for violence or criminal activity not otherwise defined, such as individuals motivated by a desire to commit violence against those with a real or perceived association with a specific political party or faction of a specific political party.”
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“Though Trump and MAGA are never mentioned in the official description of AGAAVE-Other,” Newsweek noted, “government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.”
One unnamed FBI official told Newsweek that the category would apply to leftists. Yet despite repeated violence by Biden supporters as well as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the FBI thinks there is a “low likelihood” Democrats will behave like the MAGA folks it is targeting.
“So yes,” this official told Newsweek, “in practical terms, it refers to MAGA.”
Newsweek noted that classified data it reviewed showed that while in actual numbers the FBI reported a “significant part” of the increased threats in 2020 and 2021 were related to protests after the murder of George Floyd, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jan. 6, 2021. That did not include the dozens of attacks on churches and pro-life clinics after the eradication of Roe v. Wade.
Yet, as the FBI sees it, “the main targets of the investigations and cases open were of Trump supporters.”
Newsweek added that probes the FBI calls “assessments” more than doubled from 2019 to 2021. Assessments are the “most speculative” of FBI investigations, defined generally as when a FBI agent or intelligence analyst “only suspects wrongdoing because of association or encounter and further looks into someone’s background.”
“Assessments are the closest thing to domestic spying that exists in America and generally not talked about by the Bureau,” Newsweek reported.
With those in mind, “nearly two-thirds of the FBI’s current investigations are focused on Trump supporters and others suspected of violating what the FBI calls ‘anti-riot’ laws,” Newsweek noted.
And the feds will be more active in trying to penetrate pro-Trump groups.
“Experts agree that as the 2024 election approaches, there will be greater pressure to prevent law-breaking, one that necessitates infiltration of political circles and other controversial government activity,” Newsweek reported.
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