FBI Turned Blind Eye to White Supremists in Law Enforcement

In a heavily redacted version of an October 2006 FBI internal intelligence assessment, the agency raised the alarm over white supremacist groups’ “historical” interest in “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.” The effort, the memo noted, “can lead to investigative breaches and can jeopardize the safety of law enforcement sources or personnel.” The memo also states that law enforcement had recently become aware of the term “ghost skins,” used among white supremacists to describe “those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”

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[In 2009, a Department of Homeland Security report, coordinated with the FBI concluded] that “lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”

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Faced with mounting criticism, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano disavowed the document and apologized to veterans. The agency’s unit investigating right-wing extremism was largely dismantled and the report’s lead investigator was pushed out.

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Daryl Johnson, who was the lead researcher on the DHS report [and] who now runs DT Analytics, a consulting firm that analyzes domestic extremism, says the problem has since gotten “a lot more troublesome.”


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Johnson added that Homeland Security has given up tracking right-wing domestic extremists. “It’s only the FBI now,” he said.
  The Intercept

A number of these right-wing infiltrators are not just white supremicists, they are anti-government.

A 2014 survey found that sovereign citizen extremists were perceived by law enforcement agencies as a top threat, ahead of foreign-inspired extremists. And a 2015 DHS intelligence assessment, written in coordination with the FBI, warned about the continuing threat sovereign citizen extremists pose to police officers.

A "sovereign citizen" is a member of a group who believe they are sovereign in the same way a country is sovereign and have no reason to abide by US laws.

After a series of investigations uncovered substantial numbers of extremists in the military, the Department of Defense moved to impose stricter screenings, including monitoring recruits’ tattoos for white supremacist symbols and discharging those found to espouse racist views.

“The military has completely reformed its process on this front,” said the SPLC’s Beirich, who lobbied the DOD to adopt those reforms. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t be the same for police officers; we can’t have people with guns having crazy ideas or ideas that threaten certain populations.”

Oh yes we can.

Reforming police, as it turns out, is a lot harder than reforming the military, because of the decentralized way in which the thousands of police departments across the country operate, the historical affinity of certain police departments with the same racial ideologies espoused by extremists, and an even broader reluctance to do much about it.

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Whether the First Amendment protects an officer’s right to express racist, white supremacist views — or even to associate with organizations that endorse those views — is something that remains a subject of debate.

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“This election, for white supremacists, was a signal that ‘We’re on the right track,’” said [Pete Simi, a sociologist who spent decades studying the proliferation of white supremacists in the U.S. military]. “I have never seen anything like it among white supremacists, where they express this feeling of triumph and jubilee. They are just elated about the idea that they feel like they have somebody in the White House who gets it.”