Less than one year before Americans will begin casting their votes in the 2024 election, the FBI is singling out supporters of Republican frontrunner former President Donald Trump as domestic terrorists, a report from Newsweek shows.
Testimony from more than a “dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism” to Newsweek confirmed that this increase in targeting was born out of the FBI’s decision to lump Trump supporters into its expanded definition of “domestic extremism.”
The nation’s federal law enforcement agency criminalizing opposition to the regime is not new, but it has drastically increased under President Joe Biden. FBI data reviewed by Newsweek indicates “nearly two-thirds of the FBI’s current investigations” center on Trump supporters accused of disregarding “anti-riot” laws.
[Read: After Ignoring Violent BLM Riots, FBI Targets Trump Supporters For Breaking Anti-Riot Laws]
Despite widespread, leftist-led and encouraged riots during the 2020 summer of rage, FBI data says that spikes in domestic violent extremism and domestic terrorism investigations in 2020 and 2021 “show clearly that the main targets of the investigations and cases open were of Trump supporters,” not the people who wreaked billions of dollars of damage on American cities.
Similarly, “assessments,” a shadowy tool used by the FBI to spy on Americans who have political or ideological associations deemed unfavorable by the agency, “more than doubled from 2019 to 2021.”
A drastic rise in politicized probes of Trump voters follows an avalanche of rhetoric touted by President Joe Biden, his White House, Democrats in Congress, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and other officials who have named the “domestic extremism” often pinned on Republican voters as the nation’s biggest threat.
The increase also serves as a continuation of the Biden regime’s persecution of its number one political opponent and his popular brand of wrongthink ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
A majority of Americans say the administration’s malfeasance is proof the U.S. has a two-tiered system of justice. After a year of smears and sham felony indictments, more than half of the nation says they want the left’s enforcement arm to be punished for weaponizing its power against the American people to achieve political goals.
The FBI denies targeting Americans based on ideology, but “days” after the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the agency broadened its “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists-other” (AGAAVE) classification so that it could jumpstart investigations into Americans based on their political affiliations.
The shift received hardly any attention, emboldening the FBI in October 2022 to create a whole new terrorism category, “AGAAVE-Other,” devoted to monitoring anyone the agency deemed an anti-government “domestic violent extremist” with seemingly adverse political affiliations.
Trump and his famous slogan “Make America Great Again” were not officially assigned to this category on paper or in the FBI’s joint report to Congress. Newsweek noted, however, that “government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.”
One unnamed senior intelligence official told Newsweek that he believed “Trump’s army constitutes the greatest threat of violence domestically…politically…that’s the reality and the problem set.”
Biden tried to demonize half the country ahead of the November 2022 midterms by accusing “MAGA Republicans” of being “a threat to the very soul of this country.” This screed was one of the many public confirmations his administration gave to his allies at the DOJ and FBI to keep persecuting their political foes.
Under Biden’s rule, the FBI launched attacks on concerned parents, raided a pastor’s home, refused to protect Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices from coordinated influence campaigns designed to undermine the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, and attempted to punish Republican states for protecting children including the unborn.
In a statement to The Federalist, the FBI claimed it does not target Americans “based on political belief or any First Amendment protected activity.”
“Any allegation that the FBI targets individuals solely for their political beliefs is categorically false,” an FBI spokeswoman wrote. “The FBI investigates those who commit acts of violence or threaten violence, and we do not take action based on political belief or any First Amendment protected activity.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray also claimed previously that his agency does not target people for their religious beliefs, despite a leaked memo labeling traditional Catholics “violent white supremacists” suggesting otherwise. The release of an unredacted version of the memo targeting traditional Catholics challenged that claim.
This article has been updated since publication.
