Trump plots a "workaround" to use terror powers against his foes. His foes have a shield.
The White House can't legally designate its domestic opposition as "terrorists." So here's the Trump administration's backdoor plan to do it anyway.
A top White House aide just previewed the next phase of Trump’s revenge campaign against his political opponents, and he declared that appeals to civil liberties “must fall on deaf ears.”
Too bad for him, we were listening.
Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered representatives from 66 countries at the State Department for something called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” Stephen Miller was there to help rally the world against “far-left political terrorism.” The actual purpose was something else. Trump’s team was road-testing its blueprint for using America’s counterterrorism machine against the president’s enemies. And buried in the speeches was the legal trick they’re planning to use.
To understand what’s being built (and why) you have to start with a little fact the White House hates. There is no such thing as a “domestic terrorist organization” under U.S. law. The government can only designate foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah. When I helped run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the first Trump administration, those labels allowed us to take powerful action against global adversaries, including asset seizures, sweeping surveillance, and prosecutions that could put a group’s supporters away for decades.
Again, there is no domestic equivalent. So Trump came back and immediately set off to find a workaround. Last year, he issued an executive order declaring that antifa is a “major terrorist organization,” which had no legal meaning but massive significance. He sent the FBI, DHS, and other agencies spinning into overdrive searching for antifa plots, members, and network connections across all 50 states.
Yet antifa isn’t an organization. It has no headquarters, membership rolls, or leadership team. When Rep. Bennie Thompson asked a senior FBI official under oath to simply say where antifa is located and how many members it has, the official couldn’t answer. So the “number one domestic threat” to America is a group the FBI cannot describe, even as real foreign threats go unwatched.
We know why they’re doing this. It’s a fake label. They’re using it to open investigations into groups that don’t like the president. Even still, they cannot use the government’s most sweeping anti-terror powers against these folks. They must find other crimes if they want to bring a prosecution, like money laundering or fraud.
Which brings us to the workaround. The administration has been quietly working on a plan to get around these pesky legal restrictions. And if you missed the State Department event last Thursday, it became clearer how they’re going to do it.
ONE, they’ll designate foreign groups and call them “antifa.” Last November, the State Department added four obscure European far-left groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, labeling all of them “antifa.” Almost nobody reported this tiny detail: only one of the four — a German outfit called Antifa Ost — even identifies with the antifa movement. There’s no clear evidence linking any of them to activists in the United States. That didn’t matter. The point wasn’t the groups. The point was getting the word “antifa” onto the FTO list. And Rubio promised this past Thursday that “more designations” are coming.
TWO, they’ll declare it one big transnational network. This is what the ministerial was really for. Rubio told the assembled diplomats that today’s far-left militants “coordinate,” “communicate,” and “act together” across borders and that they can “raise money in one country,” train in another, and strike in a third. Miller claimed antifa factions worldwide draw from “common networks of funding, organization, and information sharing.” Notice what’s happening. They’re constructing a factual predicate that American activists are connected to the foreign groups they just designated. Which leads me to…
THREE, they’ll use “material support” as the bridge to go after American citizens. Under federal law, knowingly providing “material support” to a designated FTO is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. And material support is defined in breathtakingly broad terms. It can be money, “services,” “training,” “expert advice or assistance,” or “personnel.” Critics of the statute have warned that even sharing a Wikipedia link with a designated group could qualify.
Once the government claims a left-wing nonprofit or a protest network is somehow providing “material support” to a foreign terror movement, the entire post-9/11 arsenal unlocks. That means it’s easier for them to activate spy powers meant to monitor al-Qaeda; freeze bank accounts; seize assets; add individuals to terror watchlists; track financial transactions; and more. They don’t have to commit violence. They just have to be linked (by the government’s own say-so) to a network the government itself defined. That’s the workaround.
If you doubt this is where it’s headed, read Scott Bessent’s speech from Thursday. The Treasury Secretary announced that his department is “expanding its efforts” to scrutinize nonprofits and charities as potential “vehicles for illicit finance,” examining where “tax-exempt status has been exploited,” and warning that officers and directors will be held “accountable.” Financial institutions, he said, “must know their grantees.”
Here’s the translation: pro-democracy funders, progressive foundations, and civil-society groups are being told that the tools built to bankrupt Hamas are now pointed at them. Bessent teased it. Treasury is mobilizing “the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad” to confront threats “here at home.”
And as I’ve written before, Trump officials don’t care whether prosecutions ultimately succeed. The process is the punishment. Last year, I warned that Trump was already gearing up for this. NSPM-7 directed every federal agency to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” so-called left-wing terrorists. Attorney General Bondi ordered the FBI to build files on anything “antifa-related,” using indicators like “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-American,” which are of course political viewpoints, not crimes. Then last week’s ministerial took the next step to unlock sweeping counterterrorism powers.
Now, let’s talk about that shield. Because the administration is hoping to scare you into forgetting that their “workaround” will walk straight into a gigantic wall. It’s called the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court has held that material-support laws can reach speech only when it’s coordinated with a designated foreign group. In other words, you have to be working in direct coordination with a designated foreign group. While Trump’s team will surely try to stretch the definition, it won’t hold up in court. Calling the president a fascist is protected. Marching in a protest is protected. Donating to an anti-Trump nonprofit is protected. Period.
My former colleague, Stephen Miller, knows this. He knows that Trump’s foes have a shield stronger than whatever powers the president tries to use against the political opposition. In Miller’s speech, he griped that “the left” always tries to appeal to “civil liberties” in order to “protect itself from facing criminal punishment.” (How outrageous — that Americans would have the audacity to invoke the laws against unlawful government conduct!)
Here Miller sounds like someone who uses the Constitution as a door mat:
“It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist…protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.”
Those aren’t the words of a confident man. They’re the words of a scared and petulant boy. Someone who’s hatching a plan to break the rules and wants you to know the rules are unfair anyway — and should be ignored. Someone like that is admitting guilt before committing the crime. And it never ends well for that kid.
Groups like ours are ready to block the administration’s illegal anti-terrorism plans. Indeed, a regime that calls dissent “terrorism” deserves to be protested twice as loud. And they just told 66 countries exactly how they plan to come after us.
Unfortunately for them, it didn’t fall on deaf ears. We heard every word.
Your friend, in defiance,
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