Domestic terrorism poses an ‘elevated’ threat in 2021, intelligence report warns

Supporters of President Trump breached the Capitol on Jan. 6. The report said the main threat was posed by domestic extremists motivated by enduring “biases against minority populations and perceived government overreach,” echoing alarms raised by federal law enforcement officials in recent months. “The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now,” Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 2, “and it’s not going away anytime soon.” The intelligence community report cited danger posed by people spurred to act by more recent narratives, including the assault on the Capitol and former President Trump’s months-long falsehood-filled campaign to overturn an election that he lost. The report said domestic extremists were almost certainly also being motivated by “conspiracy theories promoting violence” and “conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.” The assessment also raised concerns about the threat posed by “lone offenders” and “small cells” of extremists, which might be difficult for law enforcement to detect. Such lone extremists pose “significant detection and disruption challenges because of their capacity for independent radicalization to violence, ability to mobilize discretely, and access to firearms.” Wray testified that lone wolves were difficult to catch and detect because “it seems like people are coming up with their own sort of customized belief systems, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and they put it together, maybe combined with some personal grievance of something that’s happened in their lives, and that drives them.” The report concluded that racially and ethnically motivated extremists pose the “most lethal” threats.