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1 Michael German & Sara Robinson, Wrong Priorities on Fighting Terrorism 1 (2018)

handle is hein.brennan/wrgpft0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Wrong Priorities on Fighting Terrorism By Michael German and Sara Robinson Introduction After the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice named terrorism prevention its number-one mission.) But it does not treat all terror- ism with the same urgency. For many Americans, this disparity became evident when Dylann Roof assassinated Reverend Clementa Pickney and eight members of his Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. In interviews, then-FBI Director James Comey refused to call the attack an act of terrorism, aggravating long- standing complaints that the Justice Department did not view domestic terrorism involving racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and anti-immigrant violence from the far right as a national security problem on par with terrorist acts committed by Muslims.2 These concerns grew more pronounced as Donald Trump's bigoted campaign rhetoric inspired rallies around the country in which neo-Nazis, white nationalists, proto-fascists, and far-right militias openly engaged in violence. This included beatings, stabbings, and shootings of counter-protesters and journalists, with little interfer- ence from law enforcement at the time and just a handful of belated federal prosecutions.' Many in federal law enforcement blamed their inade- quate response to rising far-right violence on a lack of statutory authority to prosecute white supremacists and others as domestic terrorists. As a result, Justice Depart- ment officials have called for a new statute that would create a domestic terrorism offense, perhaps modeled on the international terrorism statutory regime. But this approach is misguided. This is the first in a series of white papers exploring the federal government's problematic responses and non- responses to domestic terrorism. In this paper, we show that existing statutes have long provided substantial authority for the federal government to investigate and prosecute acts of domestic terrorism. One of the co-authors of this paper has personal ex- perience investigating violent white supremacists and anti-government militia members as an FBI undercover agent in the 1990s. That work demonstrates that tradi- tional law enforcement tools provide ample authority to proactively prevent acts of domestic terrorism through criminal investigation and prosecution. Data produced by the federal government, supplemented with research from academic institutions and advocacy or- ganizations, shows that far-right violence, sometimes cate- gorized as hate crimes or civil rights violations, is severely under-addressed as a matter of Justice Department policy and practice, rather than a lack of statutory authority. COMBATING DOMESTIC TERRORISM I I

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