Federal and state officials announced on Thursday they have thwarted a plot against Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Ben Thorp sat down with Javed Ali, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and a Former Senior Counterroism Official with the US Government, to talk about how the plot fits into the rise of domestic extremism in the US.
Ali was one of several former senior directors of counterrorism with the National Security Council who called on the government to take the threat of domestic terrorism more seriously in 2019.
Ben Thorp: The state police were saying this is unprecedented in state history. How unusual is a plot that got this far against a sitting governor?
Javed Ali: This seems to be unprecedented at least in terms of Michigan history. Although, there is a historical record of militia history that stretches back decades. My recollection is there was nothing this advanced or this serious that emerged back then. It was smaller groups or individuals that may have had aspirational ideas about conducting attacks but nothing that seems to fit this category.
BT: We’ve heard repeated warnings about the rise of extremist violence and in particular white-supremacist violence and so I know it’s early but I wonder if this fits into a larger pattern here?
JA: As someone who was in government up until 2018 and was seeing different trends in counter-terrorism at home and abroad, one feature that seemed to be changing is this whole notion of lethal plotting emerging from this broader phenomenon of terrorism in the United States which I would consider far-right terrorism. On the one hand, there are white supremacist types of threats that we’ve seen, there are neo-nazi threats that we see cross over into these white supremacists movements. There is a separate but related movement called the Boogaloo Boys. There was a shoot out of a Boogaloo Boy member with local FBI in broad daylight at a restaurant at Madison Heights, so again this is hitting close to home. There are militia actors that we have seen with the news of today. They don’t necessarily have the same political ideologies as some of the other threats I described but in my opinion, they seem to fit into this far-right category where they share similar grievances. They’re anti-government. They have grievances against other targets like law enforcement.
There’s a much broader phenomenon that is happening in the United States that is posing serious challenges to my former colleagues in the federal government counter-terrorism space. Up until recently the lead agency for combatting these types of threats was the FBI and for good reasons. But the FBI has other counter-terrorism priorities not just those on the far-right, including other national security priorities.
Asking the FBI to be the lead agency for this type of threat inside the United States it’s going to be a challenge for the FBI. It’s going to need assistance from other partners or other stakeholders.