Following the riots that saw more than 200 cities across all 50 states burned and looted in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, it is now being reported that federal law-enforcement officials are investigating whether Antifa provided a coordinated command and control over the violence.
This follows President Trump’s May 31 tweet that the U.S. government will designate Antifa as a “Terrorist Organization” and Attorney General William Barr’s statement that same day that “the violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.”
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Fox News is reporting:
Federal law enforcement officials are probing whether “criminal actors” are coordinating violent activities during protests and are looking into reports that “rocks and bricks” have been dropped off to throw at police and other law enforcement as cities across the country grapple with the uptick in violence, a senior Justice Department official said.
“You see the hallmarks…. We’re trying to see if there’s a coordinated command and control, you see those bread crumbs and that’s what we’re trying to verify,” the DOJ official said.
Another DOJ official said the feds have seen signs of “very organized” coordination from “professional” agitators, some linked to Antifa.
The Fox News report also states:
Another DOJ official said leads [are] being pursued and cases being developed — related to Antifa and other extremists groups — by several different U.S. Attorneys’ offices.
The official declined to elaborate further because these cases and investigations are ongoing.
And with bricks and other projectiles having been hurled at police and used to break windows in cities across the nation, there is the question many have already asked: “Who placed them there?”
Fox News reported:
In New York, officials described more violent acts by protesters. New York Police Department Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said Wednesday that some of plastic bottles that have been thrown at police are often filled with cement. He also described multiple incidents of Molotov cocktails thrown at buildings with people inside.
He also described how two sites were found in Brooklyn and Queens where pre-staged bricks were placed and transported to protests. Shea said construction sites have been burglarized in Manhattan — where bricks were believed to be taken.
In Tampa, there were reports that members of the bomb team found mortars in bushes downtown, and bricks and other items were hidden in trash cans to throw at police officers.
Social media — especially Twitter — is replete with videos of pallets of bricks and plastic bins of bricks and, rocks, and other projectiles being left in areas of planned protests hours before those protests were scheduled to begin. The damage caused by days of violent rioting and looting will be difficult to measure. Besides the property damage, injuries, and deaths, there is the matter of the loss of any sense of peace.
This was clearly orchestrated and the goal was not peaceful protest, but anarchic violence aimed at terrorizing America’s cities.
And Fox News quoted “one DOJ official” as saying that Antifa has used the pretext of the peaceful protests to wreak havoc, reporting:
At least one DOJ official has described how third-party agitators — more often than not claiming to be Antifa — used the cover of mayhem to “hijack” an “important discourse” in order to destroy things.
“You get individuals from the community protesting peaceably, and what happened to George Floyd was an abomination and a crime, but then you have opportunistic looters who are out there, thugs taking advantage of the situation,” the official said.
“I’ve seen very little in the way of far-right groups, but we are looking and that may be out there.”
If the point of the “protests” across the nation was to honor the life of a man who was murdered by a bad cop, the violence and destruction have missed the mark. It appears, though, that the real goal is exactly what President Trump and Attorney General Barr have labeled it as: terrorism.
While the death of George Floyd at the hands (or more accurately, the knee) of former police officer Derek Chauvin was a travesty, the system that Antifa decries as evil and in need of destruction immediately went to work to serve justice. Chauvin and his accomplices have been fired and charged with a range of serious crimes. Chauvin, for instance, faces charges of second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The other former officers are charged as accessories to murder.
If found guilty — which will be a difficult verdict to escape, given the video evidence — Chauvin faces a 150-month presumptive sentence under Minnesota’s sentencing guidelines.
And while there is no evidence that the race of any of the officers (one of whom is black and another of whom is Asian) or the race of Floyd had anything to do with the death, it has been cast in the starring role of yet another season of Black Lives Matter vs America. It now appears that what many protesters planned as peaceful protests for justice in response to perceived racism was immediately co-opted by radical elements in Antifa and other anti-American, pro-communist groups. Those groups have been shown in city after city to have instigated the violence, destruction, and looting.
After years of the Obama administration playing footsie with Antifa and similar groups, it is good to see President Trump standing up and calling them what any honest person who is paying even a modicum of attention knows they are: a group of domestic terrorists.
With Antifa having lost its cover from the political Left, and an official investigation at the federal level, the next few months may prove interesting, indeed. Those Democrats who have provided that cover in the past will either double down or scramble to distance themselves from the violent children they have spawned. The point that decides which course those Democrats take will likely be the election. If President Trump maintains his address at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they will almost certainly have to jettison any attachment to Antifa.
Photo: BrasilNut1 / iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus
