The Daily - The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How U.S. Law Enforcement Ignored It

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

Despite repeated warnings over the past two decades, federal law enforcement officials in the United States have ignored the threat of violence from far-right extremists. Now, they have no idea how to stop it. Guest: Janet Reitman, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who is working on a book about the rise of the far right in post-9/11 America. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, despite repeated warnings over the past two decades, federal law enforcement officials have ignored the threat of violence from right-wing extremists. Now, they have no idea how to stop it. It's Thursday, December 13th. It's mid-August 2017,

and there's a police lieutenant named Dan Stout. Janet Reitman is a contributing writer for The Times magazine. Who is sitting in his living room in Gainesville, Florida, watching TV. I was doing chores around the home and had the news channels on and flipping around. Good afternoon. We're coming on the air now with breaking news from Charlottesville, Virginia. That is the scene. Suddenly, you know, everybody started covering the protest in Charlottesville. And I just sat down and started watching the event.

He's watching people that are carrying long guns, guys with a flamethrower, guys with flagpole spears. Seeing the violent protest and just sheer mayhem. And he's... And I was just like probably everyone else, just shocked. Shocked. And he was also just really perplexed. As a law enforcement officer, I was wondering, where were the officers?

Why weren't they engaging? Why was this level of violence being allowed to continue unchecked? As he is watching all of this play out, he hears on TV that... The part that really just about pulled the rug out from underneath my feet is that, okay, and where is Richard Spencer going to go to next? Richard Spencer, who is one of the key organizers of the event... Richard Spencer will speak at the University of Florida. He's speaking at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

He'll be going to Gainesville, Florida. ...is coming to his town next. We'll take a stand anywhere and everywhere. So you're going to have to get used to it. And at that point, Dan goes, Oh my God. Oh my God. This is coming to my town.

And he just knows that the only thing I could think of was, we're not ready for this. You know what? We are not prepared. But he also goes, you know what? Who's ever problem this is going to be? I feel kind of sorry for them. And on Monday morning, he shows up for work and his police chief says, you know what, Dan? Hey, Dan, you're going to be our mobile field force guy. Basically, you know what, Dan? Hey, Dan, you're going to be our mobile field force guy. Basically. You're in charge. Riot control.

So as the guy in charge of preparing for this Richard Spencer speech in Gainesville, what's the first thing that he does? So the first thing we started trying to do is what is the active intelligence that is out there? He goes through, obviously, whatever files his own department may have, which isn't much. Who were these people that were just in Charlottesville? Is there anybody that can tell me more about it? He then goes to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He reaches out to the FBI. There was not a whole lot of good, clarified, active intelligence that anyone from the state level or the federal level could offer us. And then he studies videos from Charlottesville, particularly those people who were being very violent.

And he goes back to the state authorities and says, you know, does anybody have any clue about any of these people? We were getting nothing. Nothing. And it was just kind of shocking that there was nothing there. And so he's basically reached out to every authority above him on the state and federal level and gotten nothing. This should have been something that I believe we should have had some information on. And it was just kind of baffling to me that there was this void.

There's like a Bermuda Triangle of intelligence. So, Janet, why did this happen? Why is there almost no intelligence on the alt-right? So, interestingly enough, there used to be a lot of scrutiny of the far right back in the 1990s. And the pivot point was... It was the deadliest terror attack aimed right at the heart of America. A car bomb today all but demolished a U.S. government building in downtown Oklahoma City. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

And at least 50 children were in a daycare center on the second floor. I dove under my desk and then the glass hole came in. Smoke and debris and fire on the ground. This is just devastating. One suspect, according to our sources, is in custody now.

Which was committed by a guy named Timothy McVeigh. The former soldier who had cycled actually through a number of far-right ideologies to ultimately come up with a plan with a couple of others to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, including a number of children. If this cowardly bomb was designed to send a message that no one, no place is safe, it sadly succeeded. And so after Oklahoma City, the FBI and the DOJ, they sent FBI agents into the field to infiltrate various militia groups. They arrested people, and they kind of succeeded in driving the far right to

some degree underground. And then 9-11 happens. And then what happens after that is Robert Mueller, who was then FBI director, and other senior national security officials across the entire government, they direct all of their agents to focus their energies on this new mission, which is countering Islamic extremism abroad and in the United States. And people aren't talking about Timothy McVeigh anymore. No. The entire national security apparatus is focused on preventing another September 11. apparatus is focused on preventing another September 11th. But there's one guy who's been studying white supremacist movements inside the Department of Homeland Security. His name is Daryl Johnson. So I was hired in 2005 to come over and head up a team of analysts that looked at

domestic non-Islamic extremism. And what do we need to know about Daryl Johnson? So Daryl Johnson is actually a pretty straight arrow. He's an Eagle Scout. He was raised a Mormon. He's a registered Republican. And he comes into DHS focused on domestic terrorism analysis. I was originally kind of the lone ranger at DHS for about a year or so. And he puts together a small team. We looked at the wide range of domestic extremist movements that we have here in the United States.

These can span the far right of the political spectrum or the far left of the political spectrum. And that team starts looking at left-wing organizations that the government has designated as domestic extremist groups. Specifically, radical environmentalists, animal rights organizations that have been designated as actually the government's number one domestic terrorism threat in 2005. So by 2007, Bush administration is almost over. And Daryl gets a call one day from a friend of his on the Capitol Police. And they're the people that protect members of Congress. And they call Daryl and they tell him, we have this first-term Black Democrat senator who is about to announce that he is running for president. And that asked us to monitor internet websites for extremist chatter

involving any threats to then-Senator Barack Obama. So Johnson has never heard of Obama, and he's also heard nothing, because white supremacist groups have been fairly quiet during this period of time. So he goes to his little team and says, let's look around and see what's out there. Let's see if there are any threats, if there's any kind of chatter on these message boards. And what he finds... Good evening, storm fronters and fellow white people throughout the world. We did see an increase in threats by white supremacists.

This isn't the country of our forefathers. There's this vibrant far-right movement that, unbeknownst to him and many others, has been having this complete renaissance online. I think the election generally will wake up a lot of our people, and, of course, if Obama wins, then white Americans are really going to realize where they stand. It was disturbing, and we decided to start putting some assessment and analysis behind this chatter. So, Janet, as Daryl starts to look into this and he starts seeing this movement gaining steam on the right, what role does Obama play in it?

Obama is the greatest recruitment tool for the far right and not just neo-Nazis or white supremacist racists, but for like a whole network of far right types. And as 2008 moves forward... Senator Barack Obama will win the Iowa Democratic caucuses, a dramatic... Barack Obama to win the Illinois Democratic primary. And Fox News projects Barack Obama is the winner of the Virginia... He's the winner in Louisiana. Barack Obama has effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. We've never seen an African-American lead a major party in this contest, in this race for the White House.

There is now a real recognition that this guy could actually become our president. And as Obama gained momentum, so did the far right movement. I really believe that the Obama campaign is not only fueled by black racists and, of course, and Jews. It's demoralizing to have the world's greatest military power headed up by a black. There are messages here for both whites and for the Republican Party. The number of white supremacist postings begins to increase and increase, and you just see this uptick in white supremacist and far-right activity. Some East Texas residents have been finding neo-Nazi propaganda

attached to newspapers thrown in their front yard. Today, a neo-Nazi group made another stop in the metro. The number of people joining militias is on the rise. You've never seen a neo-Nazi rally before? Not in D.C. I've seen a lot of things in D.C., but nothing like this before. AKK and neo-Nazi members showing up to rallies on anti-immigration and other issues. We saw the ranks of those rallies swell dramatically leading up to the 08 election. Every time we go someplace, we grow. We recruit new members everywhere we go.

And then... Hello, Chicago! After the election... Change has come to America. And we now know who our rulers are. As always happens when a Democrat becomes president, whites didn't get the man they wanted. The largest white supremacist website on the internet has its best day. We saw a huge increase in membership to the largest neo-Nazi website on the internet called Stormfront.

And we've already had five times the traffic that we've ever had. I mean, it's just overwhelming. Our servers can't even hardly keep up with it. times the traffic that we've ever had. I mean, it's just overwhelming. Our servers can't even hardly keep up with it. So what does Daryl Johnson do with all this information that he's been gathering about this growing movement after Obama is elected? So Johnson and his team have been steadily compiling all of their findings into a report. And the new Department of Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, is very, very interested in whatever might be going on on the far right. She was very much aware that there were threats made to Obama during the campaign, and she's really nervous about what could potentially happen to Obama. And so she asked Johnson, what's up with the far right?

And she asked, are we seeing a rise in right-wing extremism? And if so, what's causing it? So, Daryl, who's been working on this report, now takes everything he's learned, puts it together in like a greatest hits, and briefs Janet Napolitano. Yeah, it's actually quite informal. It's called a desk-side briefing where you have a manager sitting at the head of a conference table and then seated around the conference table there was myself who was to the left

of Secretary Napolitano and there were people fanned out around the edges of the room listening to the briefing. In this briefing, he lays it out that because of the election of the first Black president, because of the ongoing financial crisis, and because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and this really large number of veterans that are now home and disillusioned, the far right is presented with kind of a unique opportunity. They have all of these factors that can help drive recruitment. Did she seem interested? Yes, she did.

She, you know, flipped through the pages of the briefing slides. She nodded her head several times in agreement with what we were saying. She thanked us at the end and thought it was a very well presented briefing. When they finished the briefing, you know, they moved forward with the report. It went through various reviews. It went through vetting. I remember going home and receiving a text message from my supervisor congratulating me on a job well done. So the report goes out. Daryl goes home. And lo and behold, as I'm driving in my minivan, I had the radio on and a news program came on. What is the purpose normally of these

assessments and how unique is it to get one like this? It's very unique and it's a very threatening assessment. He said that DHS had released this report that was spying on conservatives and demonizing Republicans. Well, I'm afraid that that's the signal, that if you're going to protest against Obama, he's going to know who you are. And this kind of intimidation is so un-American. And I was like, holy crap, they're talking about the report that I just wrote, and I couldn't believe it.

And the next thing you know... I get to work early, got there Monday, and utter chaos had broken out in the office over the weekend. It's beginning to hit sort of more mainstream conservative sites. Speak out, get shut down. What some say the government is doing right now to silence its critics. You disagree with that liberal path that President Obama's taken the country down, you may soon catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security.

There are no Timothy McVeigh's out there right now. We are not extremists. They are the extremists. The Ops Center was calling because they were being inundated with phone calls. And it ultimately makes its way to Congress. Has this Homeland Security Secretary gone absolutely stark, raving mad? It would just shock you to know that she is warning not of Al Qaeda, not of Osama bin Laden. She's warning people about right-wing, radical, domestic terrorism.

Since when does being a small government conservative make one a right-wing extremist? Most of us who consider ourselves conservatives see this as a real slap in the face. This was always couched as the Obama administration is looking to monitor and surveil you. The Obama administration is calling all of you right-sympathizing individuals in our country potential terrorists. Because you support the anti-abortion movement, because you are a returning veteran,

you could be a potential terrorist. It feels like the timing is important here. It's 2009. Democrats control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. And so it feels like this is being picked up as an oppositional strategy for the right. Yeah, I think that's actually what was going on. What was happening in the background here was the Tea Party was beginning. So you saw this kind of opposition to Obama and to this entire government now that's democratically led, right? And they found in this report a perfect kind of weapon to hang everything on, and they used it. And so how do people at the Department of Homeland Security, how do they respond to

all of this pressure and this backlash to this report? I think everybody needs to take a deep breath. I think there was a lot of Washington spin going on yesterday about this report. So Napolitano herself is under fire. There are calls for her to resign. These are routine intelligence assessments. They're not accusatory and are meant to be accusatory. Napolitano initially tried to defend the report.

A number of people, including the commander of the American Legion, have asked you to apologize to vets. Are you standing by those comments? Well, to the extent veterans read it as an accusation, it is an apology is owed. She caved to this political pressure to the extent veterans read it as an accusation, it is, an apology is owed. She caved to this political pressure rather than stand up for the intelligence assessment,

and she apologized to the veterans groups. So within a month or so of that report's release, DHS sort of quietly rescinds it. They basically take it back. Yes. Because of this political storm. Yeah. And so what happens to Daryl Johnson's group and to this commitment they have to studying the far right inside the Department of Homeland Security?

So after this report is rescinded, there's now a kind of feeling within DHS that they're in the hot seat, that they're going to be scrutinized. Yeah, so initially they stopped all of our work. They stopped all of the intelligence reports that we were writing. work. They stopped all of the intelligence reports that we were writing. And so Johnson and his group were initially told to just kind of lay low for a while. This is a temporary setback. We'll wait till the backlash kind of quells and we will reconstitute your efforts. But it becomes fairly clear to them within a short amount of time that the kind of exclusive work on domestic terrorism and far-right domestic terrorism in particular is going to go away. And so... So we were eventually shut down and reassigned to do other work, including looking at al-Qaeda.

Basically, they're sidelined. And within a year, he decides to leave DHS. Daryl leaves DHS. Yes. Well, since I left and the majority of the original team members left, there was a single analyst, once again, doing it for a short period of time. And then I think they plussed up the effort by a couple of contractors for one year. And then that contract dried up and they're back down to one. And now we're currently at none.

None. None. Zero. And so this team, which is really the only team inside the Department of Homeland Security to be studying this right-wing extremism threat, basically is decimated. Right. That kind of dedicated, intensive analytical focus on the issue

kind of went away, never came back. So what happened was the administration decided this is too politically charged. And so they took the term right-wing extremism and just sort of stopped using it altogether. And what they substituted was violent extremism, which connoted behavior, not ideology. And money to train police officers, money to do studies on these groups and on the movement itself had gone away. So from everything you're saying,

there's a pretty straight line from this DHS report and this diminished capacity to study the right-wing extremism that resulted from this report to Dan Stout, who we started our conversation talking about, trying to plan for one of these rallies in Florida and finding basically a black hole where he was hoping to find a reservoir of intelligence and preparation and planning. Right. Nobody told me about Daryl Johnson. I would think somewhere in between me and him, there should have been someone that could say, hey, you should maybe talk to this guy. But nobody knew to put me in touch with that guy. So without that kind of intelligence, the only recourse somebody like Dan Stout had was to effectively turn his town into a police state. 600 troopers from the Florida Highway Patrol came, 550 deputies from throughout the state, an additional 500 National Guard. You know, snipers on the roof, you had a helicopter, and it cost half a million dollars. And who has that kind of resource? And really, is that what you want

from your city? That's my town. That's the town I grew up in. I am the police, and I don't want to live in a police state. And we damn near had to turn it into that to successfully pull this off. That effectively we have to turn our communities into fortresses to protect, you know, against violence breaking out, you know, that we should be able to in some ways prevent. So where does all of this leave our capacity to counter right-wing extremism in the United States? What is it going to take to get the government to really engage with it, study it, understand it? I think the first thing is to stop denying it and accept that there are violent people within our community. We need to look at what their problems are. We need to understand who they are, what motivates them, and then figure out a strategy.

But we have not even gotten to a place where we're frankly looking at them. After Charlottesville, there was this ABC News Washington Post poll that said that 22 million Americans believe that it is perfectly acceptable to hold white supremacist or neo-Nazi views. So to not look at it is really shocking. Janet, thank you very much. You're welcome. At least 11 people are dead and six more wounded after a man walked into a synagogue near downtown Pittsburgh

with an assault rifle and three handguns. He walked in and said, all Jews must die. A white gunman stormed into a Bible study at Emanuel AME, a historically black church. Arrested and charged with sending a series of explosive devices, 13 IEDs. Is charged with being the gunman who shot five black men who had landed on, quote, shooting or bombing the occupants of black churches......was in preparation for a race war......and show the author's hatred for blacks, Hispanics... Get out of my country. I do believe this was a hate crime.

Police say somebody called in a bomb threat to the Nation of Islam mob... FBI agents found a framed poster of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. I mean, there's just so much hate... in this country. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know.

You guys ready? Here we go, guys. Here's Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen, the president's longtime personal lawyer, was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to violating campaign finance law, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to Congress in a case that has directly implicated the president. I don't have any chance!

Among other things, Cohen has admitted to buying the silence of two women at Trump's direction to prevent them from speaking out during the campaign about what they said were sexual affairs with Trump. In a statement to the court, Cohen said that it was his blind loyalty to the president that led him to, quote, choose a path of darkness over light. In his statement, Cohen responded to President Trump's recent claim on Twitter that he was weak for pleading guilty, saying he has been weak, but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was because time and time again, I felt it was

my duty to cover up his dirty deeds. And Sir Graham Brady has confirmed that he has received 48 letters from Conservative MPs. So there will now be a vote of confidence in my leadership of the Conservative Party. I will contest that vote with everything I've got. On Wednesday night, days after cancelling a crucial vote on the future of Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May survived a dramatic up-or-down vote of her colleagues in Parliament that could have ended her tenure as the country's leader. The result of the ballot held this evening is that the parliamentary party does have confidence.

The vote was called by conservatives in Parliament who were frustrated with May's handling of Brexit. But they were outnumbered by supporters within her party, who heeded her call for stability as Britain tries to negotiate its breakup with the European Union. She does have confidence in Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party. The number of votes cast in favour of having confidence in Theresa May was 200 and against was 117. After the vote, May addressed the country outside the prime minister's residence.

This has been a long and challenging day, but at the end of it, I'm pleased to have received the backing of my colleagues in tonight's ballot. That's it for the day. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.