A new report is showing more of the federal government’s actions during the George Floyd inspired protests a couple of years ago. Since 2020, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and other members of Oregon’s congressional delegation have pressed the Justice Department and DHS for more details about the Trump administration’s response to the 2020 racial justice protests.
Portland was one of several cities seeing large-scale protests after George Floyd’s murder. In a statement last Thursday, Wyden said Oregonians have a right to a full accounting of the Trump administration’s “twisted efforts to provoke violence in Portland for his political gain.”
“Now the public knows much more about how political DHS officials spied on Oregonians for exercising their First Amendment right to protest and justified it with baseless conspiracy theories,” Wyden said. An internal Department of Homeland Security report was released last year with significant redactions. That same repirt has been released again, almost in its entirety.
The federal law enforcement deployment to Portland lasted for over a month in 2020. Those officers were from the U.S. Marshals Service, Federal Protective Service and Customs and Border Protection. It was reported that the group had limited training in crowd control. It is now reported that the officers’ violent tactics and the popular resistance they sparked fed a Trump administration narrative that Portland was under siege by what the administration routinely characterized as violent antifa terrorists.
The new unredacted report peers into and now shows how that narrative was spread from the top down through the agency and impacted operations on the ground, politicizing intelligence in ways that many found alarming.
“[Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Brian Murphy’s] intended purpose was to use the OBRs to confirm his suspicions that a link existed amongst the arrestees and identify a single individual or group that was “masterminding” the attacks,” the report reads.
Murphy, whose name had been redacted until now, also insisted analysts refer to protesters as “Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired,” a demand analysts had long insisted was not grounded in any of their intelligence collection.
“For weeks, the analysts had been telling Mr. Murphy that because ANTIFA was not in the collection, it could not be put into the analysis,” the newly unredacted portions read, making clear that the previously unnamed Murphy forced his political views into intelligence over the objection of analysts.
“Notwithstanding this feedback from the I&A analysts, on July 25, 2020, Mr. Murphy sent an email to his senior leadership instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as VAAI,” the report reads, using the acronym for “violent antifa anarchists inspired.”
An associate general counsel thought the email was so egregious that it constituted a questionable intelligence activity and warranted being briefed to the Director of National Intelligence, according to the report. The new policy requires the disclosure of sources and methods, typically closely guarded tools for collecting intelligence, unless the disclosure would “materially negate” their effectiveness.
