“We Will Find You and We Will Kill You”

IN 16 pages, the Trump administration’s new official counterterrorism strategy outlines in broad terms who it views as terrorist threats and priority targets, ranging from anti-fascist activists to ISIS and so-called narco-terrorists. The line “We will find you, and we will kill you” appears in the memo.

“[The] strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. “It combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. … We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Turse and Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement, dissect how the Trump administration is painting anyone it wants to go after — state and non-state actors — as terrorists.  “Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them,” says Hurowitz. “This anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.”

“We’re not just talking about rhetoric here,” says Washington. “We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.” 

“Say what you will about the people around President Trump,” Hurowitz notes, “but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor at The Intercept. 

Last week, we talked about the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the news on that subject has been moving really fast. I was wondering if first you could just give us a quick update on what else is happening since that last conversation.

JW: There’s been a lot happening since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act last month, well, gutted it again further, I should say. In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a new congressional map eliminating the only majority-Black district. Then in Alabama, House primaries are next week, but the Republican governor is planning to hold a special vote in four districts in August after the state redraws a more GOP-friendly map. Republican leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson are excited about it. Here he is talking about it on “Fox and Friends.”

[Clip]

Brian Kilmeade: There’s Tennessee, Alabama. How many more? 

Rep. Mike Johnson: Potentially South Carolina, maybe Missouri, Mississippi. There are other states who are similarly situated. And we think the analysis is, by the end of all this, when you correct all that, Republicans’ll probably pick up between seven and eight seats and maybe double digits, depending on how many states get involved. That’s obviously a good thing for the outcome.

[Clip ends]

JW: My only reaction to hearing that is that Republicans are clearly hiding the ball here. They’re saying that this is about fairer representation, but in Mississippi, they’re clearly trying to eliminate representation for Black Americans. The governor has called to redraw a map that would eliminate Rep. Bennie Thompson’s district. He is the only Black representative representing Mississippi, a state that is nearly 40 percent Black.

Maia, did anything strike you in that clip or just anything about this redistricting effort at all?

MH: I just keep getting struck by the way Republicans are framing this as some sort of anti-racist effort, that the way congressional districts are drawn sometimes to take into account the racial diversity or lack thereof of an area is inherently anti-democratic. And as you’ve pointed out before, in reality, that’s a disingenuous framing of what they’re doing.

JW: Yeah. We’re going to continue to watch the fallout from the Supreme Court. But I want to talk about some other news. 

There’s been talk online that we might be facing a new pandemic. Maia, what can you tell us about the hantavirus, and do I need to start stockpiling toilet paper?

MH: No, please, no one go buy a lot of toilet paper. Never helpful. 

There’s definitely a lot of chatter and panic online, but I don’t think there’s any sign that this is going to be a new pandemic. A pandemic is when there is this uncontrolled disease spread on a global scale, and there’s really no sign that’s going to be the case here.

It is, however, really fascinating. This is a wild example of a group of people who have been traveling all over the world, who are all on a ship together, and then a very rare infectious disease breaks out. People are certainly freaked out and worried about this when they’re reading about it online, and I think there’s a lot of information on Twitter, on Instagram, everywhere. There’s a lot of panic. 

What the general scientific consensus says is still that this strain of the virus, which is known to spread between people, is still more likely to spread animal to human, not human to human. And when it does spread between humans, it typically requires close contact. So you’re having a conversation with someone and your faces are close together, you’re exchanging saliva, there’s some sort of large droplet transfer, something like that, is the most likely way for this to spread between people.

We don’t know everything about it, and of course, viruses do change, but that is still the overall scientific consensus. It’s not known to spread the way Covid does, where it’s aerosolized and someone in the room has it and anyone else in the room could get it.

The most well-known vector for this disease to spread is from people actually inhaling particles from the feces or urine of rodents, especially rats. So really the people, I think, who are at the highest risk are anyone who might be in a setting where they’re cleaning that up or otherwise really directly exposed.

JW: Gross, but I do feel a little bit safer. [Laughter.]

But one thing, I do have some concerns about — we know who’s in charge of HHS, we know who’s in charge of the FDA. Do we have the public health infrastructure to deal with something like this?

MH: We know that since the Trump administration came back into office and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed to be in charge of Health and Human Services, the CDC has been pretty dramatically gutted. And the Trump administration just doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure the U.S. government used to maintain in order to keep an eye on pandemics and other disease outbreaks. So that certainly is concerning.

For example, there was a lot of chatter last week. Marjorie Taylor Greene was spreading claims that ivermectin was going to be helpful for keeping this virus at bay, and Intercept contributor Austin Campbell reached out to the CDC and asked what they thought of that, and he just never heard back. They never had a stance on it. 

Another Intercept contributor, Jackie Sweet, tracked down for a piece this past week on her Substack the case of a 75-year-old cruise ship passenger who had dual residency in both the U.S. and New Zealand. She had managed to totally evade the supervision of public health authorities, which is staggering because there were fewer than 150 people on that ship. So it’s a little bit wild that they couldn’t keep track of them all.

JW: So what I’m hearing from you is that we’re lucky that it’s this kind of virus and not something that is easier to transmit person to person?

MH: I would say that’s right, yeah.

JW: I want to talk about some other reporting that we published this week. On Tuesday, my co-host Akela Lacy published a story about Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who was detained by ICE for protesting in support of Palestinians as a part of the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters. So I know the story goes into a little bit more detail about that targeting. Maia, what can you tell us about the story?

MH: I think a lot of our listeners probably remember this moment last spring when he was detained, and he was one of the first of this group of students that the Trump administration was targeting. What Akela’s story found was that two days before ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the FBI had gotten an anonymous tip which accused him of calling for, and this is a quote from the tip, “violence on behalf of Hamas.”

Now, we don’t really have any detail in this document on what the tip is. It came in via a FOIA request that his legal team received and passed on to Akela, and the document is mostly redacted. But what we do know is that less than two weeks after they got the tip, the FBI closed this investigation, and they found that the tip did not warrant further investigation.

But by then, he was already in ICE detention in Louisiana, and the Trump administration was already calling him a “Hamas supporter” and accusing him of being a supporter of terrorism. At this point, we now know that the FBI at least had found that allegation was not worth looking into.

JW: That’s really interesting. It feels like we’re going to be unraveling what actually went behind the Trump administration’s targeting of these students. This really fits into broader efforts from the Trump administration to target any of the president’s perceived political enemies, both abroad and in the United States.

MH: Exactly. And this week, everyone in the newsroom has really been focused on this project that you’ve been working on with our colleagues, Nick Turse and Noah Hurowitz, about how the Trump administration is taking that political targeting apparatus to the next level, and what the next phase of it will look like. Could you tell us a little bit more about that project?

JW: We’ve been poring through this new counterterrorism strategy that’s been handed down from the Trump administration. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but this is a document laying out the president’s strategy for coming after his political enemies in the United States and abroad, and potentially giving him the authority to kill his political enemies.

So we’ve been really looking into this next evolution of President Donald Trump’s attempt to label his enemies — so anyone who disagrees with him — as “terrorists.” And I’ve now successfully dragged both of my brilliant coworkers onto the show to talk about it. Nick is a senior reporter covering national security and foreign policy, and Noah is a federal law enforcement reporter.

MH: Let’s hear that conversation.

JW: Nick, Noah, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having us.

Noah Hurowitz: Thanks for having us.

JW: Let’s dive right into this project. Last week, the Trump administration released its counterterrorism strategy. The 16-page memo outlines who they view as terrorist threats and priority targets. The three of us have been combing through this document for an in-document analysis that we just published.

To start, Nick, can you tell us a bit more about this document and the objectives of the administration?

NT: I consider this a truly foundational document, a genuine distillation of Trumpism as both a movement and a system of governance. The document is the brainchild of the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, who’s a truly bizarre figure and whose credentials for the job of counterterrorism czar are highly dubious.

This Gorka-led strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, and it combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. The 2026 counterterrorism strategy puts so-called domestic “antifascist” or antifa organizations on par with actual terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda as well as with international drug cartels. 

It states that there are three major types of terrorist threats. So we’re talking about what they call legacy Islamist terrorists, Al Qaeda and ISIS; narco-terrorists like the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; and these supposed violent left-wing extremists, which include anarchists and anti-fascists. The latter are longtime Republican boogeymen but don’t actually exist in a real way as, say, urban guerrillas or something like that in the United States.

This is a fictional foe. We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies, both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.

JW: I think that’s a really good way to look at this document. If we think about it as a foundational text of the Trump administration, then the foundation of the Trump administration is a politics of vengeance, which I think is borne out in so many of the administration’s policies, both at home and abroad.

Noah, I want to bring you in. One thing that this document does is loosely define who is and who isn’t a terrorist. So I want to ask you, what did we now learn about who’s considered a terrorist?

NH: One thing that I found really interesting about this document is that it specifically calls out previous weaponizations of government counterterrorism policy, which is, I think, a pretty clear reference to the prosecutions of right-wing groups, and specifically participants in January 6.

As we know, FBI Director Kash Patel, prior to becoming head of the FBI, was very critical of the federal government’s policies toward violent right-wing extremists, which statistically have been a majority of the domestic terrorists in the United States. This document really explicitly does away with that and explicitly names left-wing groups or left-wing people holding left-wing ideologies as terrorists.

There’s a specific line about doing away with the weaponization of counterterrorism policy against American citizens, when in reality we’ve seen the very explicit weaponization of counterterrorism policy and rhetoric by this administration against its domestic foes, if you will.

Most notably, the language used to describe Alex Pretti and Rene Good in Minneapolis following their deaths, and also the prosecution of nine protesters for their roles in a demonstration outside of an ICE facility in Texas last July. This is the Prairieland case in which eight defendants were convicted on terrorism charges. They might say that they’re ending the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens, but in reality, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation of it.

JW: One group that you didn’t mention here, but is mentioned repeatedly throughout the document, are people who the administration calls adherents to radical pro-transgender ideology.

Clearly throughout this document, we’re seeing references to the Christian right, references to the idea that anyone who does not adhere to these very specific tenets of white Christian nationalism — a very specific subset of white evangelical Christianity — that those groups are also considered terrorists under this document.

In April, the Trump administration released the anti-Christian bias task force report which allegedly detailed the Biden administration’s radical efforts to punish Christians and also highlighted President Donald Trump’s efforts to restore religious liberty. There are very similar themes to that document. There clearly is an effort to target anyone who is not a part of MAGA world, and so that includes, obviously, Christian nationalists, but other groups as well.

Noah, I want to ask, how would you characterize what the administration has outlined here?

NH: Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them.

JW: Nick, we’re not just talking about rhetoric here. We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.

The administration has alleged that they are targeting “narco-terrorists.” This has been going on now since September of last year. What evidence has the administration provided to justify what appear to be extrajudicial killings?

NT: Actually, we haven’t seen one shred of evidence. Instead, we’ve been treated to outlandish claims that are demonstrably outright lies. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels that the U.S. is attacking are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Trump says that the boats are hit, and then you see bags of fentanyl floating in the ocean.

First off, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities than, say, cocaine. You wouldn’t see bales of it floating in a body of water in the aftermath of an airstrike. It’s really beside the point. No fentanyl comes to the United States from South America. Ninety-nine percent of the fentanyl comes into the U.S. through legal ports of entry primarily from Mexico by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Cartels would have to smuggle fentanyl down to South America to smuggle it back by boat.

The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret. There is a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. It was drawn up by an interagency lawyers’ group, including representatives of the CIA, the White House Counsel, Department of Justice, and the War Department’s Office of General Counsel. It claims that narcotics on these supposed drug boats, cocaine essentially, are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a non-international armed conflict with the United States.

Government officials told me that this secret memo wasn’t actually signed by the assistant attorney general until days after the first boat strike on September 2 of last year. So the strikes came before the horse. I should also note that attached to this secret legal memorandum is a similarly secret list of what they call “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. That list is secret too. 

So we’re talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren’t even read into the fact that they’re in an armed conflict with the United States. 

JW: As you’ve reported, nearly 200 people are dead as a result of these strikes, but there are survivors. What do we know about the survivors of these strikes?

NT: Yeah, very little at this point. Most survivors have been gravely injured, or they’ve been left to die at sea by the United States. What’s notable is that behind closed doors in classified briefings, military officials have said that they can’t actually hold or try the individuals that survive because they can’t satisfy the evidentiary burden. They can’t bring these people to court because they know they would lose. To me, that says that there’s a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone on drug charges than to kill them for supposed smuggling. So I think of these strikes as a centerpiece counterterrorism strategy of the Trump administration.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say that these boat strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military isn’t permitted to deliberately target civilians, even suspected criminals who don’t pose an imminent threat of violence.

JW: It is so telling that they say they have the legal authority to kill people, but not the legal authority to hold them. I think it just shows the entire game, frankly.

[Break]

JW: Noah, the strategy repeatedly references narco-terrorists in Latin America as principal targets for the Trump administration’s counterterrorism efforts around the world. Does this help us to understand anything about what the administration has been doing in Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere?

NH: I think what it helps us understand is that the drug war is and always has been a instrument for various U.S. foreign policy objectives, particularly in Latin America.

Actually labeling these somewhat nebulous drug trafficking groups as explicitly as terrorist groups was, until fairly recently, a right-wing fever dream. But on day one, President Trump signed an executive order asking the State Department to label various drug trafficking groups in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America as terrorist groups. What that tells us is that the war on drugs continues to be a very useful cudgel for U.S. foreign policy in the region.

It’s been used by Trump to discipline and pressure President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. It’s been used to underwrite the sanctions regime against the government of Nicolás Maduro. Then, of course, as a pretext for the kidnapping of Maduro in January.

This counterterrorism strategy, like the national security strategy released late last year, makes repeated reference to the Monroe Doctrine, which is a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy dating back to 1823 when President James Monroe issued a diktat, if you will, basically saying that the Western Hemisphere is closed to further colonization by Spanish forces and other European powers, and basically it’s our corner of the world, butt out. 

The strand of “American First” nationalism that undergirds the Trump administration’s foreign policy is heavily influenced by this Monroe Doctrine. Now what’s interesting is that it was posed as a sort of anti-colonial doctrine — that the Spanish should stop meddling, that the British should stop meddling. But it has been used in an essentially colonialist or imperialist fashion by the United States to assert power in the Western Hemisphere for centuries now.

It is popular among American-first nationalists because it is a vision of the world that predates liberal internationalism, and instead — it’s not isolationist, it’s not, “We’re going to sit in our country and take care of ourselves” — it is, “We are going to take care of ourselves by projecting power in the Western Hemisphere.”

That is something that we’ve seen very explicitly from the Trump administration, both in rhetoric, in the national security strategy and the counterterrorism strategy, and in its actions. We’ve seen that in Venezuela. We’ve seen that in Cuba with the reinforced blockade. We’ve seen that in Mexico with the Trump administration’s treatment of President Claudia Sheinbaum. 

We’ve seen that in other countries where it appears that the Trump administration, especially through Marco Rubio, are trying to create a sort of Pan-American right-wing project linking the brain trusts and power of Javier Milei in Argentina, the supporters of Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras, the administration in Paraguay, and the the government of Ecuador, where we’ve also seen military strikes against alleged drug traffickers.

JW: Nick, this Pan-American view isn’t really limited to the Western Hemisphere. We had a conversation with historian Greg Grandin as well where he got into this. Can you talk about how the administration has also loosened rules of engagement and the effects of that on countries with U.S. military operations?

NT: This new strategy boasts that as soon as Trump retook the White House he reinstituted loosened rules of engagement that were used during his first term in office. In retrospect, we know that these weak rules during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia, for example, tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles. At the same time, U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen all spiked. The U.S. conducted more than 200 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s first term, and that was a more than 300 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

Now, Trump, already in less than a year and a half in office in the second term, is on the cusp of eclipsing his first four years of strikes in Somalia. A review of the Trump era rules by the Biden administration found that the operating principles used in these strikes including what had previously been at a near-certainty that civilians would not be injured or killed in the course of operations, were severely watered down.

When I talked to retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa during Trump’s first term, he told me that this shift in the rules of engagement led to a major shift in who could be targeted and who would be killed. In essence, it made it much easier to strike targets.

The mother and child had hitched a ride in a pickup truck that the U.S. targeted. Luul and Mariam actually survived the initial strike but were killed in a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. This was only possible because of these loosened rules of engagement that Trump has now bragged about in this 2026 counterterrorism strategy.

JW: Frankly, it’s alarming to think that now we’re going to see even more incidents like that, like you just described. And we’re seeing people targeted here at home too. 

Nick, I was looking at a piece you did last year focused on NSPM-7, the presidential memorandum that effectively created a secret list of domestic terrorists, which included everyone from anti-Christians to anti-capitalists.

One of the haunting questions from your piece was whether the administration has the authority to kill people on the list that it has designated as terrorists. The line “We will find you and we will kill you” appears in this new counterterrorism strategy. I know that stuck out to both of us as incredibly chilling.

Does this new strategy give us an answer to your earlier question? Does the administration have the legal authority to kill its enemies?

NT: The White House and Justice Department have never answered this question. It’s been left hanging there in both cases since the fall when I started asking.

But in December, Gen. Gregory Guillot, the Chief of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from Pete Hegseth and oversees the United States, seemed to answer this question, and worryingly so. When he was asked about his willingness to attack so-called designated terrorist organizations within U.S. borders by Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Guillot said that if he had questions about such an order, he would ask Hegseth, and if not, if he thought it was a legal order, then he would “definitely execute that order.”

Now, as far as four-star generals go, Guillot has a good reputation. People on the Hill, decent people there, like him. He’s not a Hegseth acolyte, not a MAGA general. But the military are, in the end, orders followers. They kill on command. They do what they’re told. You don’t get four stars on your shoulder by saying, no, sir, that’s immoral. I won’t do what you want, sir. 

You don’t see a lot of military officers at any level pushing back against the orders of this administration to attack and kill people, whether it’s in Iran or Venezuela, or specifically the boat strikes that every legal authority worthy of that name says are illegal extrajudicial killings.

With secret lists of both foreign and domestic terrorists, we don’t know who can be targeted. But it’s possible that so-called left-wing extremists could be targeted and killed on Trump or Hegseth’s say-so. In a world of secret wars, secret enemies lists, secret legal findings, we just can’t know for sure. And that alone should scare every American.

JW: I think most people in the United States would like to believe that the military would not follow those kinds of orders. But as you’ve documented throughout your entire career, we cannot count on individual soldiers not following through on those orders.

The fact that we now have an enemies list and a counterterrorism strategy that is rather explicit about targeting the left, that includes the words “We will find you and we will kill you,” I think that should be terrifying to pretty much anyone.

Noah, you’ve covered other targets, specifically nonprofits. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into the broader efforts to not only tamp down but arguably eliminate any dissent? Has the Trump administration strategy here evolved over the last year? And if so, how?

NH: As we’ve mentioned before, this anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent. Prior to the Trump administration returning to power, I reported extensively on what was known as the “nonprofit killer bill,” which was a piece of legislation in Congress that would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the nonprofit status of any 501(c)(3) organization found to be providing material support for terrorism.

That was a bill that had received relatively broad bipartisan support prior to the reelection of Donald Trump, and then in the immediate aftermath of the reelection of Donald Trump, it became much more of a partisan issue because suddenly the Democrats looked around and realized that we were going to be handing this tool to a new emboldened Trump administration. So that bill ended up languishing in legislative hell. 

I see that as an early warning sign of the way in which the Trump administration planned to use this terrorism rhetoric to tamp down on pretty non-terroristic political enemies. I think that we’ve seen most clearly that coming through in its prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Now, that is through the DOJ. They are not necessarily using the rhetoric of anti-terror against the SPLC in that lawsuit, which is based on the use of undercover informants in white supremacist groups. They did accuse the SPLC of essentially providing material support to these extremist groups by paying informants, but it was a slight evolution of the somewhat more crude use of this terrorism label against political enemies.

But we do see that they are using every tool in the toolbox to delegitimize, to prosecute, to make the lives harder of anyone they see as their political enemies.

JW: What’s also fascinating, maybe horrifying is the better word, is the fact that they don’t even have to pass this legislation. They don’t even have to convict these organizations on any charges, and yet there’s already damage. The Intercept has been reporting on the fact that certain financial institutions essentially complied in advance and began preventing donations from their donor-advised funds to SPLC. 

Nick, at different points in history, we’ve seen the government target civilians it perceived as enemies of the state, from the McCarthy era to COINTELPRO to the war on terror. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell the full impact, but how does what we’re seeing now with the Trump administration compare to these other periods?

NT: I was really struck by some of the language in this new counterterrorism strategy. At one point, it notes that the national counterterrorism activities “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups” whose ideology is and this is quoting, “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

This language of neutralization, it really harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program that you mentioned which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement; the new left; anti-Vietnam War protesters — basically domestic groups and individuals. It’s very much the spiritual precursor to Trump’s current war at home. It’s just that COINTELPRO was secret, and Trump’s effort is out and proud.

According to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, COINTELPRO turned a law enforcement agency into a law violator. The Senate committee found that the FBI went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to “disrupt and neutralize target groups and individuals,” and that they used wartime counterintelligence techniques that were antithetical to a democratic society. There was a 1967 internal FBI memo that laid this out basically that this type of counterintelligence was meant to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” — that language again — “African American groups and leaders.”

These efforts were meant to, this is another quote, “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the Senate committee. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, was one of the targets of the FBI’s campaign. The Senate Select Committee again uses that same language. They said that the FBI targeted him to neutralize him. The man that was in charge of the FBI’s what they called “war against Dr. King,” said that they used the same methods they employed against Soviet agents. It’s the Cold War at the time, very much at war with the Soviet Union.

To me, I think Trump is really reinstituting COINTELPRO under a new name.

JW: The groups that you just mentioned are all generally considered left-leaning movements. What impact did those efforts have on leftist movements in the United States?

NT: Yeah, COINTELPRO and some analogous operations were going on at the same time. They really weakened activist groups. They sowed dissent within organizations, discord among members. They broke up families. They encouraged gang warfare on the streets of American cities. It got people killed.

They utilized informants and agent provocateurs. They undermined groups that were trying to bring about social change through democratic means and hurt people that really just wanted to build a better, more inclusive America.

We can talk about the promise of 1960s radicalism and the movement and people trying to bring about social change and how it failed. But, we can’t seriously address those failures if we don’t talk about a sophisticated government campaign that was meant to undermine those groups and destroy those people.

JW: Are we doomed to repeat that history, to repeat that fate of previous leftist movements? Or is there a way for alleged enemies of the state to fight back? Noah, I want to start with you.

NH: Oh, yeah, we’re doomed. [Laughter.] Just kidding. No, I think there are definitely ways to push back on these. The Trump administration has been dealt a number of defeats in various district courts on a number of important policies.

So it’s going to be really important for groups like the SPLC to fight back from a legal basis. We’re also seeing a number of the charges that are being brought against protesters in various cities that have been invaded by ICE fall apart. The Prairieland case in Texas was actually a bit of an outlier. If you look at a lot of the cases, particularly in Chicago and Los Angeles, the charges brought against protesters there, where the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against them by the administration, have often fallen apart because juries see through what the prosecution is saying against them.

I think that we are early in this administration and we’re going to keep seeing creative methods used to tamp down on dissent. Say what you will about the people around President Trump, but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies. 

The SPLC lawsuit is a really good example of that. I’m sure they knew that these donor-advised funds were going to stop allowing donations there. It’s not just the bad press. It’s not just the legal headaches. There’s all sorts of problems that you kick off when you make an accusation like this in court.

So we are going to continue to see this so-called anti-terrorism carried out against leftist groups. It’s just going to be really important to find creative ways to push back on.

JW: Nick, how does the left survive this?

NT: The only reason that we, the public, that Congress, anyone ever found out about the COINTELPRO program is because a tiny group of academics, a daycare director, and a taxi driver broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, stole more than a thousand classified FBI documents, and exposed the FBI’s illegal operations.

The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as they called themselves, changed our understanding of how underhanded and unhinged the U.S. government is and can be. And they were just regular people. 

I’m not encouraging people to break into an FBI field office, but activists are still smart and committed, and I’m confident they’ll find a way to expose today’s illegality.

I hope and I humbly ask that they send whatever they uncover to The Intercept.

JW: Sounds like we’re going to have a lot more documents to go through. We’re going to leave it there. We go into much more detail about the far-reaching implications of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy beyond what we cover here, so you can check out our story. You can find it at theintercept.com, and we’ll link it in the show notes. 

Nick and Noah, thanks for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

NT: Thanks so much for having us. 

NH: Thanks so much.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.