DHS Group Called Being ‘Religious’ An ‘Indicator’ Of Domestic Terrorism

Brianna Lyman reporting for The Federalist 

President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) brainstormed about infiltrating local communities to spy on Americans, and suggested being “religious” or “in the military” was an “indicator of extremists and terrorism,” excerpts of documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL) purportedly show.

These excerpts, released Thursday by AFL, purport to show how in 2023, the DHS’s newly created “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group” looked for ways to expand their spying on American citizens, including by trying to “get into local communities in a non-threatening way” to get fellow Americans to tattle tale on their neighbors.

The committee, on which John Brennan and James Clapper — both notorious for their participation in the Russia-collusion hoax as well as for falsely claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation — sat, also suggested religious Americans, members of the military, and Trump supporters were possible security threats, according to segments of the documents released by AFL.

“If you ask researchers to dive into indicators of extremists and terrorism, they might indicate being in the military or religious,” one segment states. “This being identified as an indicator suggests we should be more worried about these. We need the space to talk about it honestly.”

According to the released excerpts, the group appeared to acknowledge a “political advantage” to having the “political backdrop” be tied to Trump.

“There is a political backdrop to all of this. It seems that most of the Domestic Terrorism threat now comes from supporters of the former president,” the segment states. “It is not like you want a political advantage, but people have attacked the government and its institutions for the last six years.”

While the Biden administration agreed to disband the “Experts Group” in May after an AFL lawsuit, other federal agencies under Biden have ramped up their efforts to criminalize “opposition to the regime,” as my colleague Jordan Boyd pointed out.

The FBI has targeted Trump supporters under the auspices of fighting domestic terrorism, as a report from Newsweek explained in October, citing “a dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism.”

Not only did the FBI expand its “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists” (AGAAVE) classification to include the “furtherance of political and/or social agendas,” but it also created a new terrorism category, “AGAAVE-Other,” in October of 2022.

“[Y]es, in practical terms, it refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan,” an FBI officer told Newsweek.

This is a top-down ideology, exemplified by Biden himself espousing the baseless yet inflammatory claim that “MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.”

But the real threat is Democrats’ unabashed use of law enforcement agencies to target political dissidents. The FBI, for example, used a document from the left-wing extremist group, Southern Poverty Law Center, to target Catholics for beliefs like opposing abortion and holding orthodox views on sex. The FBI labeled these individuals as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” as reported by The Daily Signal.