DHS Draft Report: White Supremacists More Deadly Threat Than Foreign Groups

White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to an early draft report from the Department of Homeland Security, Politico reported.

Two later draft versions of the same document describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language — but all three portray it as a higher deadly threat than that of foreign terrorist groups, according to Politico.

“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 declare, according to Politico. Russia “probably will be the primary covert foreign influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in the Homeland,” the documents also say.

Ben Wittes, the editor in chief of the national security site Lawfare, first obtained the documents and shared them with the news site, it reported.

A DHS spokesperson declined to comment on “allegedly leaked documents” and on when the document will be made public.

None of the drafts reviewed referred to a threat from antifa, the militant left-leaning agitators who senior Trump administration officials have described as domestic terrorists. Two of the drafts refer to extremists trying to exploit “social grievances” driving lawful protests.

Wittes told Politico the later drafts show a change in language about the prominence of white supremacist terrorism.

“It diminishes the prominence of white supremacy relative to other domestic violent extremism, and, without being inaccurate, puts it in a basket along with other violent activity that may be more palatable for the administration to acknowledge,” he said.

All three documents note that 2019 was the most deadly year for domestic violent extremists since the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

“Among DVE [domestic violent extremist] actors, WSEs [white supremacist extremists] conducted half of all lethal attacks (8 of 16), resulting in the majority of deaths (39 of 48),” the drafts read.

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