Civil Liberties Groups From Across Political Spectrum Denounce Trump’s NSPM-7

The White House directed federal law enforcement last year to pursue the opposition in broad strokes: if a person is “anti-fascist,” if they support “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” then that indicates a potential for domestic terrorism. The next step, the White House said, was to investigate and prosecute.

The directive was contained in National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, issued in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Since then, the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security have operationalized the memo’s requirements. They’ve charged opposition protestors across the country with material support for terrorism, notching a run of decades-long sentences in one closely followed Texas case. In Minneapolis, DHS cited NSPM-7 to use authorities typically reserved for drug or international money laundering cases to monitor activist groups, permitting officers to break the law and go undercover as part of a wide-ranging campaign of surveillance.

Those latest revelations came out of the federal government’s case against a group of Minneapolis protestors that prosecutors have dubbed an “Antifa” conspiracy. Attorney Kevin Riach, who represents defendant Isaac Sant, has filed dozens of exhibits in the case revealing how DOJ and DHS have operationalized NSPM-7. Riach wants the court to order the government to disclose more, including potential communications between the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s Office and officials at DOJ headquarters.

Several groups filed an amicus in the case on Tuesday to support Riach in that. Protect Democracy, the good government group, filed the brief, which was signed by the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Society for the Rule of Law.

The brief describes NSPM-7 as a key part of a broader assault that the Trump administration is staging on free speech, an attack of the sort unseen since the McCarthy Era. Both it and a December memo issued by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi set the stage for federal law enforcement to treat “political ideology as indicia of a proclivity towards violence,” staging wide-ranging investigations of beliefs, and not crimes, the groups argued.

“Under the rubric of preventing ‘domestic terrorism’ and ‘political violence,’ the administration uses disfavored ideologies to justify criminal investigations into activities that otherwise could not be targeted by law enforcement,” the groups argued.

The groups are urging the magistrate in the Minneapolis case, David T. Schultz, to order the government to reveal to the defense more information about NSPM-7 and how it was operationalized in Minnesota.

Will Creeley, legal director at FIRE, told TPM that NSPM-7 constitutes a campaign against free speech that ranks among the worst civil liberties abuses in modern U.S. history.

“This is the exact consequence that we were concerned about when first the President and then former Attorney General Bondi essentially declared that having the wrong beliefs as defined by the executive branch could justify investigation and consequent prosecution,” he said.

Creeley added that the “chill on core First Amendment rights” is already being felt.

“We already are likely confronting a situation where folks are rationally choosing to self-censor rather than risk prosecution or arrest,” he said. “The chill is the point and it’s a scary thing.”

Thomas Berry, director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, said in a statement that “Free expression is threatened when the government investigates entities based on their political leanings. Neutral application of the law is a core value of liberal democracies, and courts must ensure that prosecutions are brought based on objective standards, not political grudges.”

At the DOJ, a group formed in March called Joint Task Force Vanguard is implementing NSPM-7. The group, which describes itself as “investigative and prosecutorial,” brought the Minneapolis 15 case. It’s also brought two federal cases against defendants in the Georgia Cop City protest, and taken credit for convictions around threats to politicians across the country.

Vanguard bears the hallmarks of NSPM-7’s strategy, which calls for an approach in which the government uses counterterrorism and organized crime strategies to disrupt the opposition. Its two co-directors are Jason Kellhofer, a longtime counterterrorism prosecutor, and Brian W. Lynch, an organized crime prosecutor from Ohio.

Lynch marched on the Capitol on January 6, TPM reported last month, and was a contributor to right-wing blog The American Thinker. He presented the Minneapolis 15 case to the grand jury, exhibits that Riach filed showed, and was listed on metadata as having authored the government’s response to Riach’s motion for discovery.

NSPM-7 is another example in the utter breakdown of DOJ independence that took effect almost immediately in Trump’s second term. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts set the stage for much of this in Trump v. United States, where he decreed that the president can “discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials.”

The Tuesday brief describes how poor a track record these cases have had in the courts. Creeley, the FIRE legal director, told TPM that civil liberties advocates still look to the judiciary as the final institution that might protect basic freedoms from coming under attack.

“The burden falls on the courts, and again, at some point the High Court to clarify and reaffirm that we are a nation of laws, that all of us are bound by the law, and that, government action of the kind we’re seeing just about daily from this administration violates the law and violates our foundational Constitutional rights.”