The White House wanted investigations into those it describes as left-wing activists and the groups that fund them. And now, FBI Director Kash Patel says, the FBI is delivering.
The FBI is investigating funding associated with left-wing activism, Patel confirmed to longtime podcaster and brief FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on his recently revived streaming show.
“This FBI, thanks to what we stood up over the last year, has made significant headway under the NSPM-7 process in looking at those who funded these streams,” Patel told Bongino, adding that the bureau is “starting to arrest people who used their funds to incite violence in the guise of political peaceful protest.”
The White House issued NSPM-7 in September, a presidential memo that directed federal law enforcement to investigate ideologies — naming those who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” — as potential sources of political violence. That memo has been operationalized in part through several terrorism prosecutions, TPM reported this month. Patel’s remarks suggest that the FBI is implementing the memo to investigate funding sources for left-leaning activist groups.
At the same time, it’s Kash Patel. He’s more a streamer than a law enforcer. Bongino’s brief tenure at the FBI — during which he memorably complained about the workload before the administration took the unprecedented step of appointing a “co-deputy director” to assist him — testifies to some of this. Beyond that, Patel is operating in Trumpworld, a universe where senior officials can curry favor with the president by demonstrating how tough they are in carrying out his fantasies. Even in that credibility-killing environment, Patel has distinguished himself by using his megaphone as FBI director to misstate details in sensitive, ongoing investigations.
One ongoing case that Patel mentioned in Wednesday’s discussion with Bongino is the Prairieland prosecution. The case is the Trump administration’s first terrorism prosecution against a group of people that it has deemed members of “Antifa.” In the case, prosecutors accuse an “Antifa cell” in North Texas of having staged a demonstration outside an ICE detention facility that left one police officer shot and wounded.
After Bongino brought up the case, Patel claimed that there have been more than two dozen federal arrests. Per TPM’s count, sixteen people have been charged in federal court over the incident.
The trial was set to start on Tuesday. But District Judge Mark Pittman for the Northern District of Texas declared a mistrial during jury selection, reportedly after a defense attorney wore a jacket with a T-shirt underneath that featured a picture of Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders.
Patel likened the case to the Cop City prosecution in Georgia. There, state prosecutors filed a sprawling RICO indictment against a group of activists that had been protesting the construction of a police training center. Critics accused prosecutors of using the case to silence activists that had no tie to any act of alleged wrongdoing; a judge dismissed the RICO charges in December.
The FBI director said that his agency had to “rearrest everybody” in order to compensate for errors in the state investigation. It’s unclear what he was referring to. No federal charges have been filed in the Cop City case.
He did suggest that his leadership had seen a change in the FBI’s focus to “Antifa,” the chimerical group of beliefs that Trump II leadership has held up as a national, internal enemy.
Federal law enforcement is not only pursuing foreign threats, he said, “but those who cause violence here in America and use the guise of politics to delete that violence.”
Threats from the administration to investigate ideologically opposed charities spread fear in the nonprofit community last year. Some, per TPM’s reporting, sought to move money overseas; others considered whether to incorporate subsidiary fiscal sponsors as separate organizations.
He reminded Bongino that the two of them had “launched a serious investigation” when the podcaster was in government last year.
“We had said these organizations don’t operate alone, don’t operate in silence. They operate with a heavy heavy stream of funding,” Patel said. “And we started looking into it. And guess what, Dan? We found them.”
