The ostensible point of Thursday’s House Committee on Homeland Security hearing was to discuss domestic security threats, but as is often the case on Capitol Hill, members of both parties took the opportunity to pursue other lines of inquiry.
For Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, this was not good news.
The South Dakota Republican, who faced multiple calls for her resignation, struggled on many fronts, including an especially difficult exchange in which she claimed that her department hadn’t deported any military veterans, only to be confronted moments later by a military veteran whom DHS had deported, participating in the hearing via online video from South Korea.
But arguably the most amazing Q&A in the hearing had less to do with Noem and more to do with the person sitting next to her. Reuters reported:
A top FBI official called the anti-fascist movement antifa the biggest domestic terrorism threat to the U.S. during a congressional hearing on Thursday, but struggled to answer detailed questions about the unstructured far-left campaign. Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, said antifa was the agency’s ‘primary concern’ and ‘the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing.’
When Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s ranking member, asked some rather obvious questions — about antifa’s location and membership, for example — Glasheen said it was “very fluid” and that “investigations are active.”
So, while the operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch sees antifa as the nation’s “most immediate violent threat,” he couldn’t say literally anything of substance about its location or membership after months of investigation.
“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee to say something that you can’t prove,” Thompson told Glasheen. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”
This was embarrassing but unsurprising. On the contrary, it is part of a larger pattern of misguided events.
Antifa — to the extent that it exists — is made up of loosely affiliated anti-fascist activists. There is no budget. There is no membership list. There are no offices or headquarters. There are no staffers, leaders or board members. And yet, in September, Donald Trump signed a ridiculous executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” (notwithstanding its lack of organization), and two weeks later, the president held a roundtable discussion at the White House that included several Cabinet members, devoted entirely to a far-left entity that hardly exists in any meaningful way. Two months later, the operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch testified under oath that the administration perceives antifa as the nation’s “most immediate violent threat,” in spite of not having anything meaningful to say about the unorganized movement — reinforcing the impression that federal agencies and officials are chasing more of a mirage than a threat. Whether Glasheen genuinely believed what he said about antifa or he pushed the White House’s preferred line to avoid getting fired, the main takeaway is that conservatives are fixated on a bogeyman. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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