International- Trump Officials Push Allies to Pursue Antifa and Far Left as Terrorist Threats-INA NEWS

When senior Western officials met in Ottawa last month to discuss potential terrorism threats in light of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, a top State Department counterterrorism official delivered an unexpected message.

The United States was as concerned as always about Islamist terrorism, said the official, Monica A. Jacobsen, according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by The New York Times and three officials briefed on the meeting. But, she told her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia, the Trump administration also wanted more attention on what it believed was an insidious, underestimated threat: the far left.

Western governments must combat “antifa and far-left terrorism,” Ms. Jacobsen’s prepared remarks asserted, casting the effort as an evolution in counterterrorism following the “global war on terror.” Her prepared speech defined far-left terrorism to include threats from communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with “eco-extremist” and “other self-identified antifascist ideologies.”

“It is important to recognize their actions as political terrorism rather than mere protest or criminality,” said her prepared remarks, though it was unclear if she delivered them exactly as written. As evidence, the speech pointed to left-wing protesters who had recently clashed with the police in Italy.

Ms. Jacobsen’s appeals were part of a sweeping new effort by the White House to press foreign governments and embassies abroad to join its fight against what it calls far-left terrorists. The Trump administration is deploying its global counterterrorism machine against far-left movements like antifa — shorthand for “antifascist” — despite offering little evidence they present a dire threat to U.S. citizens.

This article is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with current and former U.S. officials, as well as officials in foreign governments that were asked to aid the effort, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues and closed meetings.

A leader of the initiative is Sebastian Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s National Security Council. He has pushed to designate more far-left groups abroad as terrorist organizations, to pressure foreign allies to investigate the groups and to search for connections between them and Americans.

In November, the State Department took the first major step in the strategy by designating four leftist groups in Europe — two in Greece, one in Germany and another in Italy — as terrorist organizations. None of the groups has been known to have plotted attacks on Americans in the past decade, which is usually a criterion for such a designation.

Although the designations generally impose financial restrictions, the administration could try to use them to expand the powers of the government to surveil, investigate and prosecute left-wing activists on American soil. The administration is already targeting many activists on the left.

Mr. Gorka has repeatedly told U.S. officials that “there are no lone wolves,” according to two officials who have witnessed the comments, in urging them to find links between left-wing extremists abroad and Americans, which could create a legal avenue to investigate U.S. citizens.

That possibility has alarmed current and former U.S. officials who worry the Trump administration is politicizing counterterrorism efforts, with the ultimate aim of punishing Mr. Trump’s opponents at home, potentially with charges of supporting terrorism. The unusually expansive way in which the administration has defined far-left extremism, they warned, could allow investigators to use slender connections to people overseas to go after Americans who have no real history of violence.

“They are trying to invent antifa as an international threat to tie it to groups and individuals in the United States,” said Tom Joscelyn, a counterterrorism expert who helped write the congressional report on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “It suggests that the administration is further down the path of twisting the counterterrorism machinery of the U.S. government to going after domestic political opponents than people realize.”

Redirecting Counterterrorism

The current and former officials also worry that the administration is funneling counterterrorism resources toward left-wing extremists just as intelligence is showing an increase in potential threats to Americans related to the Iran war. It comes after the teams at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department responsible for addressing those threats have already been stretched thin by a year of firings, resignations and reassignments.

The strategy reflects a shift in U.S. counterterrorism. The Biden administration identified right-wing extremists like white supremacists as the chief threat. The Trump administration has now largely redirected those resources toward far-left groups like antifa.

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed 112 people across 152 terrorist attacks in the United States, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research institution. Over the same period, left-wing extremists killed 13 people over 35 attacks, according to the analysis, while jihadist attacks left 82 dead.

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director appointed by Mr. Trump, testified to Congress during the Biden administration that the top domestic terrorism threat facing the nation came from “racially or ethnically motivated extremists,” particularly white supremacists. He noted that antigovernment extremists from both the right and the left were also a significant threat.

The State Department said in a statement that it was working with international partners to counter “antifa-aligned terrorism,” including by targeting the funding and travel of violent leftist groups. The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information that helps disrupt such groups’ finances. The department said many European nations shared its concerns, though it did not name the countries.

Mr. Gorka, a firebrand conservative commentator, has been coordinating the new push with Thomas G. DiNanno, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security.

At a counterterrorism meeting in Budapest in December, Mr. DiNanno expounded on his belief that antifa is a terrorist group. “Antifa is a false prophet that embraces intimidation, censorship and, ultimately, violence. Antifa is fascism,” he said. “We have learned from our decades-long struggles with Al Qaeda and ISIS that we must stop threats from this destructive cancer before it metastasizes.”

He applauded Hungary for pushing the European Union to designate antifa as a terrorist organization. Many Trump administration officials see Hungary and Viktor Orban, its prime minister, as a cornerstone of a transnational hard-right movement against liberal values. Mr. Gorka also has family roots in Hungary and ties to hard-right groups there.

In a text message, Mr. Gorka said the reporting in this article was “wrong” but did not respond to an email that laid out the findings. Mr. DiNanno did not respond to requests for comment. The State Department referred to his public remarks.

Internal Action

Trump appointees have added antifa to a list of targets laid out in the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, a classified document that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies use to determine where to focus their resources and attention, according to a current U.S. official and a former one. Antifa has never before appeared on the list, which has included established terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In September, Mr. Trump signed an executive order labeling antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though there is no such designation in federal law. And in reality, antifa is not a single organization. It is a broad movement of loosely affiliated groups that identify with the antifascist label, and it lacks clear membership or hierarchy. Puck and Reuters earlier reported on some of the administration’s recent moves against antifa.

For months, Mr. Gorka has led a regular counterterrorism meeting with dozens of officials from U.S. security agencies. In those meetings, he has pushed for more attention on antifa, as well as other groups, like transgender activists and undocumented migrants.

Participants were frequently frustrated that the focus on left-wing groups was distracting from more pressing threats, such as ones tied to Iran and the Islamic State, according to two officials who have attended.

In an effort to attract support, the State Department is seeking to host a May workshop for foreign law-enforcement officials in The Hague to teach them about the dangers of far-left groups and how to counter them, according to an internal State Department document, a current official and a former official.

Planned invitees include officials from Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, India and Indonesia, according to the document. So far, U.S. officials have received less interest than they had hoped for, the two officials said.

The State Department is also planning a summit on the topic in Washington in July for foreign government officials.

The proposed gatherings resemble an earlier program known as the Counterterrorism Law Enforcement Forum, which brought together international investigators largely to discuss the threat of right-wing extremists, said Ian Moss, a State Department counterterrorism official under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The Trump administration shut down that program, but now appears to be trying to revive it and aim it at the far left, but without much justification, he said.

The administration has also largely halted a Department of Homeland Security initiative to map networks of far-right groups, according to a former department official.

At the same time, the administration has sought to strengthen ties with right-wing groups overseas and to bolster their standing in their own countries.

Pressuring Allies

In September, days after signing his executive order on antifa, Mr. Trump issued a national security memo that called on the government to counter violence fueled by ideological beliefs, including anticapitalism, anti-Christianity and hostility toward “American views on family, religion and morality.”

In November, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed to similar concerns when he designated the four European groups as terrorists. The State Department said the groups had all carried or threatened violent acts, including planting bombs at government buildings. Yet the acts the department outlined in a fact sheet were a far cry from the violence carried out by established terrorist organizations, which often aims for mass fatalities.

At the same time, U.S. diplomats have pushed governments abroad, particularly in Europe, to investigate the far left, telling them terrorist groups were operating within their borders.

U.S. allies have been unsure about how to respond.

The two Greek organizations newly designated as terrorist groups are seen as small and not particularly active, a senior Greek government official said. Yet to avoid upsetting the Trump administration, the Greek authorities did not oppose the U.S. designation, the official said.

Michalis Chrysochoidis, Greece’s minister in charge of counterterrorism, told a Greek news outlet in November that antifa is not a terrorist group. “Antifa exists across Europe, including in Greece,” he said. “But, until this day, they have been activists. They have not engaged in any terrorist activity.”

German officials were similarly flummoxed when the State Department designated a small, loosely organized group called “Antifa Ost” as a terrorist organization. In its designation, the department noted that some of the group’s members used hammers to attack far-right protesters in Hungary.

German officials declined to call the group a present danger.

“The potential threat posed by the group has recently decreased considerably,” Sarah Frühauf, a government spokeswoman, told reporters in November. “The ringleaders and particularly violent members of the group have either already been convicted or are in custody.”

One group in Germany expressed delight at the designation: the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which German intelligence has labeled a “suspected extremist” group. In interviews, several AfD members said they had pushed the State Department to apply a terrorist designation to Antifa Ost, and boasted that the agency’s move was a sign of their influence.

Reporting was contributed by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Julian E. Barnes from Washington, Michael D. Shear from London and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin.