A newly unredacted DHS report reveals that Trump’s DHS justified their spying by falsely referring to Portland’s 2020 racial justice protesters as “Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired."
October 30, 2022

The revelations come in a revised April, 2021 report that previously had been heavily redacted.

The original, redacted report contained horrifying details of a totally inept federal response combined with a determination to smear the protesters as violent antifa activists, despite a lack of evidence. Few of the hundreds of federal law enforcement officers that were deployed to Portland in the summer of 2020 had been trained in crowd control, OPB then reported. Instead, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, led by loyalists
Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, obsessively focused on demonizing the protesters with a reckless disregard for their rights.

The revised report provides new details on those efforts and they are just as horrifying. Wolf and Cuccinelli requested “baseball cards,” i.e. intelligence dossiers, on every one of the thousands of Portland protesters. But DHS’ Intelligence and Analysis personnel put together baseball cards on only those who had been arrested or charged with “violent acts,” according to a recent OPB report. That was bad enough.

The baseball cards provided lists of protesters’ friends and family, their travel history, social media and other records unrelated to securing federal property or homeland security, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) noted. It was all done as part of an effort to prove baseless MAGA conspiracy theories.

More from OPB:

“[Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Brian Murphy’s] intended purpose was to use the [baseball cards] to confirm his suspicions that a link existed amongst the arrestees and identify a single individual or group that was “masterminding” the attacks,” the report reads.

Murphy, whose name had been redacted until now, also insisted analysts refer to protesters as “Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired,” a demand analysts had long insisted was not grounded in any of their intelligence collection.

“Notwithstanding this feedback from the I&A analysts, on July 25, 2020, Mr. Murphy sent an email to his senior leadership instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as VAAI,” the report reads, using the acronym for “violent antifa anarchists inspired.”

An associate general counsel thought the email was so egregious that it constituted a questionable intelligence activity and warranted being briefed to the Director of National Intelligence, according to the report.

But while the Trump administration was so intent on smearing protesters, it was shockingly sloppy at real national security. The unredacted report states that new hires, who “had barely received any form of training,” received laptops to start collecting information on protesters. Yet the laptops had not included appropriate security software. “Without these tools, they believed that they were vulnerable to any nefarious actors looking to expose their private information, doxx DHS personnel, or invade the employee’s home network,” the unredacted report said.

Shocking, but not surprising.

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