Portland Report

This story from November 2022, about the waning months of the first Trump administration, is a glimpse of how a second Trump administration would use its power to persecute anyone it doesn't like.

It describes a Department of Homeland Security report I never heard about, which details the way Trump's DHS worked to make the post-George Floyd protests in Portland into a vast antifa conspiracy (an "alternative fact" Trump still presents as truth today). 

The report was made public by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden not long before the 2022 election, even though it was finalized in mid-2021.

[The report] includes descriptions of orders handed down to “senior leadership” instructing them to broadly apply the label “violent antifa anarchists inspired” to Portland protesters unless they had intel showing “something different.”

Once the dossiers were received by the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to tie the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor abroad. Efforts to drum up evidence to support the administration’s claim that a “larger network was directing or financing” the protesters — a task assigned to another unit, known as the Homeland Identities, Targeting and Exploitation Center, diverted away from its usual work of analyzing national security threats — “did not find any evidence that assertion was true,” the report says.

People were being abducted off the street by men in military fatigues and put into unmarked vans. Not surprisingly in the context of 2020, journalists were attacked with impunity. 

Remember what it was like? Republicans want to bring it back, only worse.