Oh, hell, they ARE desperate

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is set to label white supremacists as the most serious terror threat facing the United States.

In three draft reports reviewed by Politico, DHS says the threat posed by white supremacists is more significant than the immediate danger from foreign terrorists.

“Foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for Homeland attacks but probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year,” all three documents say.

Russia “probably will be the primary covert foreign influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in the Homeland,” the documents add.

[...]

Kevin McAleenan, the former DHS acting secretary, ordered the agency last year to start crafting annual homeland threat assessments. The three draft documents use varying language to describe the threat posed by white supremacists, but all of them say they pose the most significant threat, according to Politico.

[...]

None of the drafts refer to Antifa.

  The Hill

They may have been pressured by this...

A former top Department of Homeland Security official who resigned in April says the Trump administration is creating the conditions for domestic extremism to flourish in the United States.

Elizabeth Neumann left her position as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention after three years at DHS. In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, she offers a candid assessment of the counterterrorism community's failure to address the threat posed by domestic extremism.

She says the administration is paving the way for even more violence.

[...]

White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah responded to NPR's request for comment on Elizabeth Neumann's charges that the White House has not addressed the threat of domestic extremism, particularly what Neumann referred to as "right-wing extremism."

In an email, Farah dismissed Neumann's concerns as those of a "disgruntled employee."

[...]

Neumann saw signs of rising domestic extremism soon after she arrived at DHS in February 2017. At the time, she was serving as the deputy chief of staff for Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly.

[...]

She's also concerned that people who served as "guardrails" around the president have left the administration. Those "adults in the room," she says, took the heat from the White House in order to allow people like her to keep carrying out their work. This fear is what prompted her to speak publicly, while many other senior administration officials have declined to do so.

[...]

Neumann saw the diffuse nature of right-wing extremist violence as a particular challenge. "It was hard for the counterterrorism community to put their finger on it, in large part because the movement is more of a movement than a group or an organization," she says.

That lack of official group cohesion reminded Neumann of the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). She watched domestic extremists use the same tactics as the terrorist group.

[...]

But unlike the urgent interagency response to ISIS, Neumann says there was no clear effort to combat violent extremists on the right.

[...]

"We [wanted] to make sure this [ended] up in the president's FY 2021 budget," she says.

[...]

"They just asked for it to be couched in terms of 'preventing violence' and not 'domestic terrorism.' And my sense was they were doing that pragmatically," she says. "They seem to understand that for whatever reason, if we use the term 'domestic terrorism' or we talk about the white supremacist language, that seems to derail things at the White House."

[...]

When Trump finally started using the term "domestic extremism" himself in the summer of 2020, it was in reference to the violence and looting that occurred during the protests across the country against police brutality targeting Black Americans, which the president attributed to "antifa." For Neumann, this was an obvious red herring. She says that the numbers don't bear out the idea that left-wing violence is as much of a problem as right-wing violence, and arrests during the summer's protests demonstrate that.

"If you look at the people that have been arrested for that, by and large, I mean, it's the boogaloo movement or it's an association with QAnon. It's the right side of the spectrum. It is not antifa." She's unequivocal about this: "The threat of domestic terrorism is not from antifa. It is from these right-wing movements."

[...]

"I am really concerned that in a second term, [Trump] will not have the ability to make wise decisions because there are no officials surrounding him anymore that have the experience and the gravitas to be able to tell him, 'No, you cannot do this, this is illegal.' Or: 'If you do this, it is likely that this other nation-state will respond in a drastic way that will lead us to war.' That's what's at stake here," she says.

[...]

"It's his style. His style is chaos itself. And when you have chaos at the top of the federal government, that creates chaos throughout every other level of government. That means we cannot perform our security functions well," she says. "The first and primary job of a president, the first and primary job of the federal government, is to protect us."

  NPR

Elizabeth Neumann has been making the rounds of news programs and podcasts.