The federal indictment of 15 alleged antifa cell members in Minnesota on conspiracy charges last week is sending antifa’s leaders into a panic, scrambling over the case’s legal implications for the underground movement.
In response to last week’s raids on the residences of the defendants, allied antifa accounts across social media started circulating an alert warning others, “One of our comrades was arrested and all of their electronics were confiscated. Please alert all of your groups. Stay safe.”
The People’s City Council of Los Angeles, an anti-capitalist collective in California, issued a statement saying that federal authorities mounting a conspiracy case against suspected antifa operatives is “how they will come for you,” instructing its followers, “You should be discussing this with your comrades and organizing groups.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the defendants have since set up a legal defense fund on Chuffed.org, a left-wing crowdfunding site for financing social justice causes. Within a week of its creation, the fund has already amassed more than $200,000 from over 3,000 donors, most of them anonymous.
Conspiracy case exposes antifa’s covert operations
Antifa, by design, is subdivided at the local level into loosely affiliated cells, or “affinity groups,” organized around their shared anarcho-communist beliefs. This decentralized structure serves to shroud antifa’s operations in secrecy and undercut claims that it is a unified criminal organization, despite these cells often working in tandem to attack political targets they perceive as “fascist.”
For years, the mythos surrounding the far-left movement has helped antifa’s forces evade prosecution. But compromising the clandestine movement’s public image as an amorphous and imaginary threat is the 94-page indictment that lays out, in extensive detail, the Minneapolis-area antifa network’s organizational structure, operational strategies, and covert communication tactics.
Direct Action Minnesota, the antifa network named in the charging documents, is accused of organized violence targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. As outlined in the indictment, DAMN’s members hold regular meetings, coordinate almost exclusively through encrypted Signal chatrooms, and train their foot soldiers in guerrilla-like warfare ranging from tactical surveillance to mass mobilization.
INSIDE THE ANTI-ICE ANTIFA CELL RAIDED IN MINNEAPOLIS
Some extremism researchers expect the conspiracy case to expose antifa as a real and organized threat, debunking the myth that antifa is merely an idea.
Capital Research Center president Scott Walter said the investigation’s findings will “blow up the ridiculous lie that antifa doesn’t exist.”
“Antifa does exist but in a decentralized way,” Walter said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “And it works very hard to maintain what its soldiers call ‘operational security,’ so that their enemies can’t figure out what they’re doing, who they are, and where they are.”
Walter noted that antifa activists are particularly alarmed about the FBI infiltrating the Minneapolis cell’s Signal group chats, as many other antifa groups rely on the supposedly secure messaging platform to plan criminal activities.
“The feds have penetrated into the encrypted messaging of these underground networks, and they’re terrified because that is where the evidence is of their crimes,” Walter said. “To prove a conspiracy, you have to prove these people were planning crimes and then carried out those crimes.”
The Intercept, a liberal outlet sympathetic to the antifa cause, published a piece last week panicking over how federal investigators were able to access the accused’s Signal messages, which prosecutors largely built the conspiracy case around. Antifa-aligned influencers then shared the instructional article highlighting “steps” to take to conceal their correspondence.
“Keep in mind that Signal’s disappearing messages delete the contents of a message, but they don’t remove evidence that communications between parties occurred in the first place,” the Intercept article advised. “This means that even if a group has enabled disappearing messages, someone who gains access to a member’s device could later determine with whom they were chatting. Therefore it’s safest to regularly delete entire groups and chats, not just the messages themselves.”
Allies also vulnerable to exposure
On the day federal officials announced the conspiracy charges, a group of supporters gathered outside the Minneapolis courthouse in solidarity with their indicted comrades. Among them was the National Lawyers Guild, which Walter said functions as the legal arm of antifa. Members of the NLG were seen displaying a banner that read “Fighting Fascism Since 1937.”
There, an attorney for NLG’s Minnesota chapter held a press conference, demanding that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota drop all charges against “our community members.” That morning, “A legal observer’s house was raided,” according to a community alert.
“A legal observer almost certainly means the National Lawyers Guild,” Walter said.
Originating as a Stalinist communist front in the 1930s, the NLG today deploys so-called legal observers, the “eyes and ears” of its criminal defense team, to preplanned riots. The embedded operatives, tasked with building defense cases while on the ground, act as an assurance against arrest and prosecution.
“Before riots, they tell the rioters, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll do our best to keep you from even getting arrested. And if you are arrested, we will get you out of jail immediately. It is very unlikely that you’ll end up being prosecuted, but if by chance you lose the lottery and face prosecution, we’ll represent you,’” Walter said.
Wearing lime-green hats, NLG’s army of legal observers works to ensure that antifa rioters beat their criminal charges, promising their rioting clients ahead of planned violence that they will get them off scot-free.
“Those green hat guys are a crucial part of the riot machinery, and now they’re in danger of being held accountable for conspiring to aid these alleged criminal acts,” Walter said. “If you’re planning to do something criminal and I am planning a way to make it likely that you can get away with it, then I’m in trouble too, because I have assisted you in your crimes by making you think you’re going to be able to escape legal accountability.”
Also at risk is the NLG’s tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization.
Internal Revenue Service rules prohibit charitable entities from “encourag[ing] the commission of criminal acts by planning and sponsoring such events,” and nonprofits accordingly found complicit in criminal conspiracies risk losing their tax privileges.
DOJ building on its recent antifa-busting success
The newly unsealed indictment marks another test of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle criminal enterprises that operate under the banner of antifa.
ANTIFA INC: HOW AN IDEOLOGY BECAME AN ORGANIZED CRIMINAL NETWORK
The conspiracy case out of Minnesota follows the Justice Department’s successful conviction of 16 members or affiliates of an antifa cell in Texas, including nine coconspirators found guilty in the first-ever federal trial to bring terrorism charges against antifa militants.
In the Texas case, which involved the cell ambushing an ICE facility near Dallas, seven defendants took plea deals admitting in sworn statements that the anti-ICE attack was launched “in line with [an] Antifa ideology,” and five of them flipped to testify at trial against their comrades in exchange for reduced prison time.
Never before in U.S. history had antifa members openly confessed in criminal court to their membership, let alone unmasked other associates.
Since the Minnesota arrests, antifa accounts are widely sharing a flyer directing activists, “Don’t Talk to the FBI,” to avoid implicating themselves or others.
The graphic contains a number for the NLG’s “FBI Hotline” to dial if a subject is approached by federal investigators, as well as a script to follow during questioning. “Every day is Shut The F*** Up Friday,” one account captioned the advisory.
Walter said that in riot-plagued cities, such as Portland, Seattle, and Chicago, progressive government officials tend to tolerate left-wing violence in the streets and refuse to enforce the rule of law. “There have been extremely few legal actions taken against antifa anywhere, and they are not used to this,” Walter told the Washington Examiner.
“We’re now seeing the feds get involved, and that is a brand new thing for antifa,” Walter said. “They thrive in cities where soft-on-crime Soros DAs turn a blind eye to their thuggishness, so after years of swimming in the kiddie pool, they suddenly find themselves in the deep end with the FBI.”