Biden Administration ‘Going after Violence’ in Crackdown on Domestic Terrorism

“Leaders have the discretion to tailor discussions with their personnel as appropriate, but such discussions should include the importance of our oath of office; a description of impermissible behaviors; and procedures for reporting suspected, or actual, extremist behaviors,” Defense Secretary Austin wrote, calling the stand down just the start of “must be a concerted effort. 

“[This] sadly is not an issue that we haven’t dealt with or tried to deal with in the past,” Kirby said Friday about the Pentagon’s need to confront extremist ideology. “You heard the secretary himself talk about when he was in command of the 82nd Airborne down in Fort Bragg, an issue they had with [neo-Nazi] skinheads in the unit and that was when he was a lieutenant colonel back in the mid-90s.”

“The events of January 6 certainly galvanized the sense that it is still in the ranks, still a problem,” he added.

Of the 181 individuals charged in the siege of the U.S. Capitol, 20 have some sort of military background, according to a tally by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Additionally, of the 143 investigations opened by the FBI into current and former military members last year, 68 were because of concerns about domestic extremism, according to the Defense officials.

In an interview Friday, the U.S. Navy’s top admiral warned that domestic extremists are also actively targeting former military members.

“We have a responsibility to educate those that are leaving the service that they are going to be recruited by these people, and they need to be aware that they’re going to have people reach out via email or social media,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday told Breaking Defense.

White House officials have described their effort to get a better sense of the threat posed by domestic extremism as even broader, pointing to data that shows the FBI is conducting an average of about 1,000 domestic terrorism investigations each year.

“Our work on this is just beginning,” the senior administration official said, expressing hope the initial review on the size and scope of the country’s domestic extremism problem will be completed in the next three months.

“We’re going to be painstaking and really building out the picture of this threat, effectively getting the kind of expertise at the table that’s necessary to confront it,” he said.

“Depending on what we find in this review, we will have to confront the question of whether, in fact, additional personnel, additional dollars would need to flow to federal law enforcement,” the official added.

Complicating matters, according to experts and counterterrorism officials, is that social media has allowed U.S. extremists to communicate with like-minded people around the world.

“It’s an area of acute interest,” the senior White House official said, noting “the potential for linkages to foreign networks, foreign organizations, foreign funding and so forth.”

So far, the U.S. has only designated one white supremacist group as a global terrorist organization –- blacklisting the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) last April.

The listing has helped the U.S. to keep RIM members from entering the country and to deny them other resources. 

In remarks last month, then State Department counterterrorism coordinator, Ambassador Nathan Sales, told a virtual forum the designation of RIM “shouldn’t be the last” for a foreign white supremacist group.

“”We need to continue to identify potential targets,” he said.

Jeff Seldin is VOA national security reporter. VOA’s Masood Farivar contributed to this report. This article  is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).