While most Americans are beginning to realize that ANTIFA is in fact a domestic terror organization, law enforcement, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, has so far been hesitant to investigate it as such. But as current events and actions taken by law enforcement are starting to show, that may be changing.
A few months back, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler attempted to deny the existence of ANTIFA, but that may be hard for him to do now.
Federal Bureau of Investigations Director Christopher Wray recently told the House Homeland Security Committee that the FBI is currently conducting “quite a number” of “domestic terrorism investigations,” which are targeting “violent anarchists” who are inspired by the ANTIFA ideology.
“ANTIFA is a real thing,” Wray said to the committee, though he stressed that it is more of an ideology than an actual organization.
“We look at Antifa as more of an ideology or a movement than an organization. To be clear, we do have quite a number of properly predicated domestic terrorism investigations into violent anarchist extremists, any number of whom self-identify with the Antifa movement. And that’s part of this broader group of domestic violent extremists that I’m talking about, but it’s just one part of it. We also have racially motivated violent extremists…militia types and others,” Wray continued.
Though Wray said that most of the bureau’s cases related to racially motivated extremism consist of white supremacist groups, he acknowledged that there are also “cases involving African American defendants who have pursued violence against, say, law enforcement.”
Wray said that the did not know if the cases regarding targeted attacks on members of law enforcement by “racially motivated extremism” were linked to Black Lives Matter, a group that he specifically referred to as an organization, unlike ANTIFA.
Wray also said that the majority of the FBI’s work against domestic terrorist threats involved cases of racially motivated extremism.