The Trump administration is distorting intelligence toward the end of discrediting political opposition.

According to an old saying, one occurrence of something might be an accident, and two might be a coincidence, but three times constitute a pattern. The past month has seen three major instances of the Trump administration corrupting important issues of national security and foreign affairs to wage a domestic political battle. National security will suffer as a result.

A Disproportionate Focus on Left-Wing Terrorism

One instance concerns counterterrorism. Secretary Marco Rubio’s State Department convened a conference on left-wing terrorism, which senior administration officials described as a scourge more serious than any other flavor of political violence. Foreign governments invited to the conference were generally unenthusiastic about the affair, and most of those that attended sent only low-level representatives.

Rubio was necessarily defensive over the fact that those governments and most other informed observers do not prioritize current terrorist threats the way the administration does. He accused anyone who focuses more on right-wing terrorism of ideological prejudice and said, “You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference, in spite of the clear and undeniable reality.”

The reality is that right-wing terrorism has killed significantly more Americans than the left-wing variety over the past 50 years. Eighty-three percent of those killed in terrorist attacks in the United States since 1975 were victims of the 9/11 terrorist spectacular, which Islamists conducted. Of the 618 deaths from all other attacks in the United States during that period, Islamists perpetrated 23 percent and leftists only 10 percent. The largest cause of fatalities—63 percent—was right-wing terrorism.

Left-wing terrorism has had a more recent uptick that has coincided with, and undoubtedly is related to, Donald Trump’s domination of American politics, as manifested in attempts on Trump’s life. But left-wing terrorism is still far below levels it reached during its prominence in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Parsing data on terrorist incidents did not motivate the convening of the conference. It had more to do with discrediting the political left in American politics by associating it with violent extremism. This motivation was apparent in the administration’s “Counterterrorism Strategy” document, published earlier this year, which reads more like a campaign brochure than a strategy. In an example of projecting onto political opponents what the administration itself is doing, the document asserts that in the Biden administration “individuals at the highest level of the US government used their significant powers to target individuals in the interests of those they favored politically, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections,” in addition to the intelligence community being “weaponized by its leadership as a political tool.”

The “strategy” document identifies as the major types of terrorist groups “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs,” “legacy Islamist terrorists,” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.” There is not a word about right-wing terrorism.

The principal author of that document is the administration’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, who, according to press reporting sourced to multiple current and former US officials, revealed his real strategy in discussions with colleagues. Gorka wants to attach foreign terrorist labels to “antifa” to justify going after American citizens having any association with a movement bearing that name.

There is no delineable group, let alone a terrorist group, called “antifa.” That term has been applied to a loose movement of leftist activists who oppose right-wing ideology and especially, as the term implies, oppose fascism. The organization of the movement has largely been limited to informal, ad hoc coordination of activities such as rallies and demonstrations. There is no reasonable way that “antifa” could be added to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations consistent with the terms of the law that governs that list.

Trump tried to circumvent that inconvenience last year when he “designated” antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” There is no official list of domestic terrorist organizations like the list of foreign ones. Trump’s “designation” was a legally meaningless exhortation to dislike anyone called antifa and for federal agencies to find ways to go after such people.

Purported Chinese Interference in American Elections

A second recent episode in the pattern of subordinating a serious issue of foreign threats to a domestic political fight was Trump’s prime-time speech ostensibly about election fraud and foreign interference in US elections. The speech, which was filled with false or misleading statements, did not mention the well-documented Russian interference that helped to elect Trump in 2016. Meanwhile, Trump implied that in both the 2018 midterm election and the 2020 presidential election that he lost, fraud had occurred and somehow China was involved. 

The White House released a collection of redacted classified documents that Trump claimed supported his assertions. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius spent what he says were “many hours” reading the documents and has provided a useful summary of what they really say. “Rather than supporting Trump’s inflammatory claims about Chinese election meddling and other threats,” Ignatius reports, “the documents undermine many of his arguments. And contrary to his portrait of a diabolical ‘deep state,’ they show an intelligence community that’s almost comically cautious and bureaucratic in reaching its conclusions.”

The documents describe a careful process that produced an interagency intelligence assessment in August 2020 concluding that while “China prefers that President Trump be defeated…Beijing did not intend to try to affect the election.” The same intelligence assessment, while thus exonerating China of interference, stated that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin was endeavoring to spread false claims that Joe Biden had engaged in criminal activity related to Ukraine.

Trump’s motivation clearly had nothing to do with safeguarding US elections from foreign interference. Instead, it was about using the specter of such interference to juice up his false claims of fraud and discredit the results of the election he lost in 2020 and those his party may lose in the coming midterms.

The Cuban Subversion Canard

The third recent instance in the pattern was the issuance by Rubio’s State Department of a 100-page paper titled Cuba: The 21st Century Capital of Communism. The paper attempts to portray Cuba as a juggernaut of political subversion aiming to foment a communist revolution in the United States—notwithstanding any contradiction between this portrayal and Trump’s assertions that the Cuban regime is on the verge of collapse.

The paper also clearly is designed to discredit the mainstream American political left by associating leftist fringe elements with Cuba and repeatedly asserting that the fringe has entered the mainstream. It thus uses the Cuba issue the way Gorka and the administration are using the terrorism issue, which is to smear much of the administration’s domestic political opposition. 

The paper’s argument is contorted in several ways, including by vastly inflating the threat from the regime of a destitute country that can barely keep its lights on. The paper correctly notes that Cuba still has a capable intelligence service that partly targets the United States, as manifested in espionage cases that have come to light. But the impression conveyed of the power of this “capital of communism” to influence events in the United States or other countries overstates even the powers Cuba once had, let alone those of the decrepit Cuba of today.

The paper seems stuck in a time warp. The vast majority of the events, people, and groups it describes date back more than half a century. It discusses at length activities of the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, and other entities from the 1960s and early 1970s, and then strains to connect any of this to what is politically relevant today.

What connections the paper tries to make to today’s mainstream political left are exemplified by its observation that “In 1995, Barack Obama launched his first-ever run for political office in the living room of [Bernardine] Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers” of the University of Illinois. Decades earlier, Dohrn had been a leader of the left-wing terrorist group known as the Weather Underground. The paper also mentions some favorable comments that Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass once made about Fidel Castro, without mentioning Bass’s later renunciation of those comments.

The paper is an exercise in innuendo that associates American individuals and groups with the Cuban regime merely because the regime commented favorably about what a group does or because the group has advocated policies that the regime also would welcome, such as ending the decades-long embargo of Cuba that has accomplished nothing but isolating the United States from the world community. Missing is any evidence that Cuba is directing or manipulating the individuals and groups concerned or that they otherwise are doing Havana’s bidding. 

It is in this vein that the paper goes after the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of dozens of American groups that oppose the embargo and certain other aspects of US policy toward Cuba. The paper asserts that “NNOC’s materials reveal the continuing reach, coordination and sophistication of Cuba’s subversive capabilities on American territory,” while citing the coalition’s “national rapid response plan” for responding to a US war against Cuba or the imminent possibility of such a war. 

But a look at the plan itself reveals not only no connection to the Cuban regime but also nothing subversive. Instead, it is a plan for peaceful protest to include rallies in front of federal buildings, banners hung on overpasses, and leaflets distributed outside grocery stores. The planned actions would be firmly in the tradition of peaceful protest against previous misguided wars, including those in Vietnam and Iraq and the current war in Iran.

The Politicization of National Security

Each of these three instances of political corruption of national security matters involves a smear against American groups or individuals who are falsely accused of being terrorist sympathizers, beneficiaries of fraud, or lackeys of a hostile foreign power. But what ought to concern Americans of every political persuasion most is the degradation of national security itself.

Counterterrorist resources are limited. To divert them in one direction for political or ideological purposes while refusing even to recognize the existence of another brand of terrorism that poses at least as great a threat opens the nation to a future terrorist shock like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 167 people.

Similarly, making false allegations about election interference to discredit one’s election losses while dismissing as a hoax foreign interference that actually occurred is a recipe for still more such interference. And as Ignatius aptly notes, “What’s frightening about Trump’s wild accusations of fraud is that they could ‘undermine confidence in US democratic processes,’ which the National Intelligence Council warned in a January 2020 memorandum was a basic goal of foreign meddlers.”

As for Cuba, the main current danger is not any subversion emanating from Havana. Still, it is a possible war against Cuba launched with as little strategic forethought as the one against Iran. Preparing public opinion for such a war may have been another purpose of the State Department paper. If so, that would be even more reason not to silence through innuendo legitimate debate about the wisdom of such a war. 

About the Author: Paul Pillar

​​Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the US intelligence community, in which his last position was as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts US Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for The National Interest.

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