Exclusive: FBI Builds Out National NSPM-7 Center to Track Dissent, Docs Show

The FBI has tapped employees from across federal law enforcement to crack down on dissent, including agents and analysts with the Internal Revenue Service, documents shared with TPM show.

They’re working at the FBI’s NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, per records obtained through FOIA by watchdog group American Oversight.

In National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the White House laid out a national strategy for federal law enforcement, directing it to treat beliefs like “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as indicators of domestic terrorism.

The records obtained by American Oversight include organizational charts for the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center and a list of thirteen IRS employees — names redacted — who are detailed to work at the center. Emails obtained by American Oversight between IRS employees, including one assigned to the Tax Exempt and Government Entities division and another assigned to Criminal Investigations, also reference a “Violent Anarchist Task Force Working Group Meeting.”

The org charts, dated May 20, show that two attorneys from the DOJ’s Office of the Deputy Attorney General — the nerve center that runs the Justice Department — are a part of the Joint Mission Center.

The records reveal details of the architecture that federal law enforcement has built to implement NSPM-7 and fight “Antifa,” the loose network of anti-fascist activists that the administration has deemed a terrorist threat. The records are heavily redacted.

Against the backdrop of an administration in which the president has wielded law enforcement as a tool to target his political opponents, the disclosures suggest that the government’s financial investigators are starting to play a role in cases brought to serve partisan political ends.

NSPM-7, issued last year as the Trump administration, sought to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a means to justify a wide-ranging crackdown on the left, and the administration’s political opponents. It has, over the last year, turned into an onslaught against freedom of speech. In Minneapolis, federal agents with DHS cited the memo as they deployed undercover agents and aggressive financial investigative maneuvers to surveil unions, churches, and other groups protesting the administration’s occupation of the city, Operation Metro Surge, and its aftermath. In other cases, NSPM-7 has been invoked as the administration charges people for posting threats on social media.

At the DOJ, operationalizing NSPM-7 has meant the creation of Joint Task Force Vanguard. That effort is co-led by Brian W. Lynch, who prosecuted organized crime as an assistant district attorney in Ohio and then nationally as a federal prosecutor. He also marched on the Capitol on January 6, TPM first reported. Vanguard’s other co-director, Jason Kellhofer, is a longtime counterterrorism prosecutor.

The DOJ declined to comment. In the past, it’s strenuously denied that its efforts to implement NSPM-7 infringe on freedom of speech.

The role of the IRS in NSPM-7 hasn’t been fully fleshed out. Using the Trump administration’s definition of terrorism, NSPM-7 directed the IRS commissioner to ensure that no nonprofits “are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.”

The IRS wields broad powers over civil society. A large proportion of advocacy and research groups are registered as nonprofits, granting the IRS the ability to scrutinize their nonprofit status.

But so far, and in spite of striking fear in the hearts of nonprofits across the country, the IRS has, as far as we know, not yet attempted to revoke a charity’s nonprofit status for political reasons. Some have argued that doing so could provoke an equal response under a future Democratic administration.

The records show that three analysts and ten agents from IRS’s Criminal Investigations have been detailed to the center. An email from December obtained by American Oversight shows a thread between Adrian Gonzalez, Director of Compliance Planning and Classification in the IRS’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities division, corresponding with an employee of Criminal Investigations under the subject line “Violent Anarchist Task Force (VATF) Working Group Meeting.”

Jarod Koopman, the new head of Criminal Investigations at the IRS, reportedly said last month that he planned to focus enforcement on nonprofits as part of a crackdown on terrorism.

The Joint Mission Center is doing much of the work of collecting information relevant to and helping enforce NSPM-7, FBI co-deputy director Chris Raia said in an interview released by the FBI earlier this month. Raia described the center as the bureau’s answer to NSPM-7, and likened it to the way the agency had “worked the Iranian threat.”

“There are pieces of this threat that encompass our criminal division. There are pieces of this threat that encompass the cyber division. There’s pieces that, uh, encompass [counterterrorism], even [counterintelligence], believe it or not,” he said. “We took bodies from all these different divisions. We put them under one roof, so to speak.”

“And then we’ve added, of course, our partners at [Homeland Security Investigations], Department of Treasury, IRS, and we have them all sitting in the same space,” he added.

The existence of the FBI’s NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center was first revealed in a budget request to Congress in March.

Per the organizational charts, the center divides the country up into the Eastern and Western Continental United States. Each half has three “Conus” (Continental United States) subdivisions. One chart is fully redacted apart from a label that reads “embedded intel.” Another chart, titled “Ops,” refers to “Nationwide Partner Support” without additional detail made public.

The office is run by a section chief, has a unit titled “intel,” and several program analyst positions assigned to it.

The FBI and Treasury didn’t return requests for comment.