The Department of Homeland Security issued a national terrorism alert warning that violent domestic extremists could attack in the coming weeks, encouraged by the January 6 riot on the United States Capitol.
DHS, in a warning issued on Wednesday, said that violent extremists who oppose the government and the presidential transition “can continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence”. The department said it had no evidence of a specific plot.
The DHS launch was part of a public alert called the National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin.
The alert is the first in the department in about a year. The latest DHS bulletin came in January 2020, warning about Iran’s potential to carry out cyber attacks. DHS notably did not issue an alert prior to the planned January 6 rally in Washington, DC, which turned into a Mafia siege on Capitol Hill, despite online public conversation that extremists planned to do so.
Wednesday’s warning described a number of factors in the recent past that have increased the potential for violence among American extremists.
Violent extremists were “motivated by a number of issues, including anger over Covid-19 restrictions, the results of the 2020 elections and the use of force by the police,” the warning said. The alert also listed opposition to immigration, citing this as a motivating factor in the killing of 23 people by a white supremacist in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.
DHS said it is “concerned that these same factors of violence will remain until the beginning of 2021 and some [domestic violent extremists] can be encouraged by the January 6, 2021 violation of the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, to target elected officials and government facilities. “
“This is a bulletin that should have been issued in late December,” said Elizabeth Neumann, a former DHS counterterrorism officer who served during the Trump administration and criticized the department’s approach to the matter. “I am grateful that the new DHS team quickly assessed the available intelligence and fulfilled its legal duty to alert the public to the threatening environment we face.”
Since the January 6 riot, far-right groups have used increasingly violent rhetoric in online chats, sharing bomb-making materials and guerrilla tactics and calling for an asymmetric war with the government, according to researchers at the Soufan Group, a non-partisan center that tracks extremist movements.
“There is open talk about the war, that the war is coming, that ‘2021 will be our year’,” said Mollie Saltskog, an analyst at the Soufan Group. “It all happened after January 6.”
The Proud Boys, a far-right group, tried to downplay their role in the Capitol rebellion. A WSJ investigation shows that in many of the key moments of the day, the Proud Boys were at the forefront. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann
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