Why the DOJ’s Antifa Terrorism Convictions Threaten the First Amendment
A Fort Worth, Texas case shows we're on a slippery slope toward labeling any president’s ideological opponents as organized terrorists.
Frank Figliuzzi, the host of Need to Know on Lincoln Square, is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. Subscribe to his Substack.
U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors performed a magic trick on Friday in a federal courtroom in Fort Worth, Texas. Before the jury’s eyes, they transformed a group of young protesters who were present when shots were fired last summer at an immigration building, into a domestic terrorist organization that DOJ insisted on calling “Antifa.”
Eight of the nine defendants were convicted on charges of material support to terrorism – the first successful use of such charges against the nebulous cloud of Antifa that the Trump administration has confabulated into an ominous threat.
The DOJ’s case rested on a statute that was historically used to prosecute members of carefully designated international terrorist groups against an ill-defined, broad hodgepodge of politically left-of-center American activists. But doing so — even against those who engage in clearly criminal conduct — put us on a slippery slope toward labeling any president’s ideological opponents as organized terrorists.
The facts here aren’t pretty, but neither do they prove the existence of Antifa. During the three-week trial, prosecutors submitted as evidence encrypted Signal messages showing the protestors felt that less confrontational rallies against ICE were not working. Some of the defendants chose to bring guns to the event – which is legal in Texas.
A police officer who responded to a call for help at the facility was shot and wounded by Benjamin Song, a protestor who carried an AR-15. The jury convicted Song of one count of attempted murder and found him not guilty of attempting to shoot at two correctional officers. He faces life in prison. Four others charged with attempted murder were acquitted.
Song’s conviction for attempted murder isn’t the concern of course. It seems perfectly justified. In fact, it demonstrates that serious charges and consequences are available when protests turn violent and evidence of membership in a trumped-up terror group is flimsy.
Rather, the issue is the lengths to which the government went to claim that the protest participants were part of a barely cognizable entity. And it’s an entity that only exists as a terrorist group because Donald Trump says so.
Just two months after the Texas attack, Trump designated Antifa a domestic terror organization via executive order. Until that moment, our government deliberately did not have a mechanism to designate a domestic terror group because the idea was so likely to lead to political abuse and the stifling of First Amendment rights. We don’t even have a federal law against domestic terrorism.
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