WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials sought to determine Sunday whether extremist groups had infiltrated police brutality protests across the country and deliberately tipped largely peaceful demonstrations toward violence — and if foreign adversaries were behind a burgeoning disinformation campaign on social media.
As demonstrations spread from Minneapolis to the White House, New York City and overseas, federal law enforcement officials insisted far-left groups were stoking violence. Meanwhile, experts who track extremist groups also reported seeing evidence of the far-right at work.
Investigators were also tracking online interference and looking into whether foreign agents were behind the effort. Officials have seen a surge of social media accounts with fewer than 200 followers created in the last month, a textbook sign of a disinformation effort.
The accounts have posted graphic images of the protests, material on police brutality and material on the coronavirus pandemic that appeared designed to inflame tensions across the political divide, according to three administration officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss investigations.
The investigations are an attempt to identify the network of forces behind some of the most widespread outbreak of civil unrest in the U.S. in decades. Protests erupted in dozens of cities in recent days, triggered by the death of George Floyd, who died after he was pinned at the neck by a white Minneapolis police officer.
Pandemic-weary Americans were already angry — about COVID-19 deaths, lockdown orders and tens of millions of people out of work. The pandemic has hit African Americans harder than whites in the U.S., and the killings of black people by police have continued over the years even as the topic faded from the national stage.
But there are signs of people with other disparate motives, including anarchist graffiti, arrests of some out-of-state protesters, and images circulating in extremist groups that suggest the involvement of outside groups.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Sunday that state authorities were hit with a cyber attack as law enforcement prepared to diffuse protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the epicenter of the unrest. He described it as a “very sophisticated denial of service attack on all computers.”
President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Bar and others have said the left-wing extremist group antifa is to blame. Short for anti-fascists, antifa is an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.
Barr on Sunday said the FBI would use its regional joint terrorism task forces to “identify criminal organizers,” and Trump threatened again to name antifa a terrorist group.
The Justice Department is also deploying members of the U.S. Marshals Service and agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration on Sunday to supplement National Guard troops outside the White House, a senior department official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The addition of the federal agents, who will have armored vehicles, came as Barr warned that prosecutors could seek to use terrorism statutes against “violent radical agitators” who attempt to hijack protests to cause destruction.
An antifa activist group disseminated a message in a Telegram channel on Saturday that encouraged people to consider Minnesota National Guard troops “easy targets,” two Defense Department officials said. The message encouraged activists to steal “kit,” meaning the weapons and body armor used by the soldiers. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
As a result, soldiers with the Minnesota National Guard were armed during their mission at protests across the state Sunday, the officials said. The soldiers are sometimes armed but had not been since they moved into parts of the state that had been besieged by riots in the last few days. The troops do not have the authority to make arrests, and are there to act mostly as extra security for police.
Others have seen evidence of right-wing extremists. J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, has been monitoring chatter about the protests among anti-government extremists on social media platforms. She has access to dozens of private Facebook groups for followers of the loosely organized “Boogaloo” movement, which uses an ’80s movie sequel as a code word for a second civil war.
She also has been poring over images from the weekend protests and spotted some “boogaloo bois” in the crowds, carrying high-powered rifles and wearing tactical gear.
“They want to co-opt them in order to start their war. They see themselves as being on the side of protesters and that the protesters themselves are useful in causing anarchy,” MacNab said.
She also sees signs that the Three Percenters militia movement appears to be taking an interest.
Megan Squire, an Elon University computer science professor who tracks online extremism, saw images of at least four members of the far-right Proud Boys group on the periphery of a protest Saturday night in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Trump was expected in the coming days to draw distinctions between the legitimate anger of peaceful protesters and the unacceptable actions of violent agitators, said a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the plans ahead of time and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Trump administration has largely remained silent on local reports that far-right protesters were also involved. Meanwhile, Democratic mayors said Trump’s handling of the crisis was reminiscent of one of the darkest moments of his presidency — when he said there were “good people on both sides” of protests in 2017 over white supremacists demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia.
America’s racial fault lines are a perfect opportunity for foreign adversaries looking to sow discord and portray the U.S. in a negative light, according to James Ludes, director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island.
“This is a real issue and Americans are legitimately upset about it,” said Ludes, who studies foreign disinformation tactics. “That’s one of the hallmarks of these campaigns. You don’t create new issues, you exploit existing issues.”
There’s a history of this. In 2016, another black man, Philando Castile, was killed by police in a Minneapolis suburb, his death livestreamed on Facebook. Russians used a fake Black Lives Matter page to confuse and stoke anger among the protesters. There were nearly 700,000 followers, but it’s not clear how many were real.
One debunked example from this week: That Atlanta had deployed a “child militia.”
Floyd was accused of trying to pass a bad bill at a grocery store after he was laid off in the pandemic. Disturbing video showed him prone on the street, while a white police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck even as he cried he couldn’t breathe. He later died. The officers have been fired; Derek Chauvin, the officer who pinned Floyd in the video, was charged with murder.
At first there were peaceful demonstrations, but violence soon erupted. A Minneapolis police station was torched and protests took off around the country, growing increasingly tense. Video showed a police vehicle ramming into demonstrators in New York. Meanwhile, a van with four New York Police Department officers inside was hit with a Molotov cocktail and torched.
Hundreds have been arrested nationwide and cities braced for more protests. But booking information from the county jail in Minneapolis, for example, showed that out of 59 protest-related arrests, 47 people had a home address in Minnesota, with the majority coming from the Twin Cities.
Before protests began in New York City, organizers of anarchist groups began raising money for bail, recruited medical teams to deploy for violent interactions with police and planned how to target high-end stores, said John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
Scouts on bicycles would also move ahead of the groups to report where the police would be and then direct small breakaway groups to areas where they could torch police cars or throw Molotov cocktails, Miller said.
The NYPD has arrested 786 people related to protests since May 28 and 1 in 7 of them were not from New York City, he said.
In Washington, where protesters raged outside the White House, most of the 17 people arrested were from the area. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said the groups seemed, at the least, organized to destroy with tools to break windows and distribute materials.
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Associated Press writers Kathleen Hennessey in Minneapolis; Michael Kunzelman in Silver Spring, Md.; Michael R. Sisak in New York; Michael Biesecker in Reston, Va.; David Klepper in Providence, Rhode Island; and James LaPorta in Delray Beach, Fla., contributed to this report.
Officials blame differing groups of ‘outsiders’ for violence
WASHINGTON (AP) — As protests over the death of George Floyd grow in cities across the U.S., government officials have been warning of the “outsiders” — groups of organized rioters they say are flooding into major cities not to call for justice but to cause destruction.
But the state and federal officials have offered differing assessments of who the outsiders are. They’ve blamed left-wing extremists, far-right white nationalists and even suggested the involvement of drug cartels. These leaders have offered little evidence to back up those claims, and the chaos of the protests makes verifying identities and motives exceedingly difficult.
Police officers across the country were gearing up Saturday for another night of potentially violent clashes in major cities. Some states had even called in the National Guard to aid overwhelmed police.
The finger pointing on both sides of the political spectrum is likely to deepen the political divide in the U.S., allowing politicians to advance the theory that aligns with their political view and distract from the underlying frustrations that triggered the protests.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday told reporters he’d heard unconfirmed reports that white supremacists were coming from elsewhere to stoke the violence and that even drug cartels “are trying to take advantage of the chaos.” John Harrington, the state’s commissioner of public safety, later said they had received intel reports on white supremacists.
“But I cannot say that we have confirmed observations of local law enforcement to say that we’ve seen cells of white supremacists in the area,” he said Saturday.
But federal officials later pointed to “far left extremist groups.” President Donald Trump alleged the violence was “being led by Antifa and other radical groups.” Antifa, short for anti-fascists, is an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.
Attorney General William Barr later seemed to echo Trump’s assertion, saying the violent incidents in Minneapolis were driven by groups using “Antifa-like tactics.” Barr vowed that federal prosecutors across the country would use federal riots statutes to charge protesters who cross state lines to participate in violent rioting.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the attorney general’s assertion was based on information provided from state and local law enforcement agencies, but did not detail what that information entailed.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf was even more vague, declining to point to any particular ideology in his assessment. His agency has heard that “a number of different groups are involved in these whether it’s Antifa or it’s others, frankly,” he said. The groups appeared to be organized and using tactics that wouldn’t normally happen in peaceful protest, he said, though he didn’t elaborate.
While the motives behind the violence were unclear, there was firmer evidence that some of the protesters were coming to the demonstrations from outside the urban centers that have been the epicenter of the demonstrations.
In New York City, federal officials were bringing charges against several suspects, including one of two sisters from upstate New York accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail through the back window of a police van in Brooklyn, a law enforcement official said. The initially peaceful demonstrations in New York City over Floyd’s death spiraled into chaos as night fell Friday. Protesters confronted police officers, destroying police vehicles and setting fires.
In Detroit, 37 of the 60 people who were arrested in overnight protests did not live in the city — and many came from nearby suburbs, police Chief James Craig said Saturday. Although Detroit is about 80% black, many of those arrested were white.
“We support the right to free speech. We support peaceful protests,” Craig told reporters. “If you want to disrupt, stay home and disrupt in your own community.”
Initially, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said he’d been told all of those arrested in his city Friday were from outside the state. But a spokesman said Saturday night the mayor had later learned more than half are from Minnesota.
In Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, 47 of the 57 people arrested in protest incidents through Saturday morning had provided a Minnesota address to authorities, according to Jeremy Zoss, a spokesman for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office.
Carter expressed the opinion of many black activists in the Twin Cities who have expressed disbelief that local residents would destroy their own neighborhoods, burning down essential services and damaging small businesses. And while it was local protesters and groups that staged initial angry, but peaceful, demonstrations, it was agitators from elsewhere that strategically escalated the tension by causing damage and setting fires, they said. Their beliefs were reinforced by the large numbers of white people in the protests in Minneapolis.
“I think about a third of the people are from out of town here to make the city burn,” said Justin Terrell, executive director of the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage. “It is just putting black people in a crossfire not just between fascists and anarchists — but putting us in a crossfire with the national guard.”
It’s exceedingly difficult in the chaos and dark of the events to prove these claims. The challenge is made harder in the Minnesota protest, where very few arrests were made in the first two nights of unrest. St. Paul arrest records showed 18 people were arrested on charges related to civil unrest from Thursday to early Saturday morning. Of those, only four were from outside the state; two were listed as unknown.
Still, some civil rights leaders had a clear message for anyone coming to protest, even those who show up to call for justice for Floyd.
“The moment has passed. Go home, stay away from here. We are a vulnerable population. At the end of that day if black folks can’t rebuild then the only thing we’ve done is build more power for white folks,” said Terrell. “You’re talking about years, decades of work undone by these groups — and by the officer.”
Trump vowed Saturday that the “radical left criminals, thugs and others” would “not be allowed to set communities ablaze.”
“I will not allow angry mobs to dominate,” he said. “Won’t happen.”
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Hennessey reported from Minneapolis. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Michael R. Sisak in New York and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.