The Department of Homeland Security tried to ensnare hundreds of protesters who attended social justice protests in Portland in an effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s claims about a “terrorist organization” that was supported by Democrats, Gizmodo reports.
An internal report shared by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) contends that Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, led an effort to collect secret dossiers on people in Portland attending protests in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis Police officer.
"The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment; 'twisted efforts,' Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting 'baseless conspiracy theories' to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s 'political gain.' The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the 'friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests' — up to and including 'First Amendment speech activity.' Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an 'anarchist extremist' specifically because 'sufficient facts' were never found 'to support such a characterization,'" Deadline's report stated.
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The report states that dossiers were also collected on people who were never arrested but were merely accused of issuing threats and “on persons arrested having nothing to do with homeland security or threats to officers.”
The DHS report also describes orders handed down to “senior leadership” instructing them to broadly apply the label “violent antifa anarchists inspired” to protesters unless there was information showing “something different.”
"Once the dossiers were received by the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to tie the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor abroad," Deadline reports.
Read the full report over at Gizmodo.
