The Bondi Memo’s Quiet Rewriting of Domestic Terrorism Rules

The Dec. 4 Bondi memo—leaked earlier this month—is confusing when you first read it.

On the surface it looks familiar: another directive on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” sprinkled with the right statutory citations and the usual disclaimers about respecting First Amendment rights. But taken together with Trump’s executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), and a string of European “Antifa cell” designations, the memo does something more serious. It quietly turns domestic terrorism authorities into a standing program for targeting one broad ideological camp while the administration’s own National Security Strategy claims, almost in the same breath, to reject “ideological monitoring” and “pretextual” uses of power.

That contradiction has real consequences. It signals that the formal rules that grew out of the Church Committee era—the rules that resulted in things such as the Privacy Act, the Attorney General’s Guidelines, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) —are now being hollowed out from within.

For 10 years, I served as counsel for Domestic Terrorism in the National Security Division. Before that, I worked in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel and as an Army judge advocate. My work was to help the government stop genuine threats without slipping into domestic intelligence work that treats belief itself as the problem.

I left when I could no longer tell myself that line still held.

Domestic terrorism investigations and prosecutions are inherently fraught. The line between protected speech and association as well as true threats and acts of violence is vanishingly thin, so every step carries real civil liberties risks. The system functioned, roughly, because the government had rails to run on: the Attorney General’s Guidelines, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, FISA, the Privacy Act, and lessons taken from the Church Committee. Those guardrails stood for a simple proposition: investigate and prosecute conduct tied to crime or violence, not ideas and beliefs.

The Bondi memo takes that settlement and bends it.

What the Memo Does    

The memo begins with 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), defining domestic terrorism as activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are intended to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy. In principle, that definition covers a wide range of threats: neo-Nazi accelerationists, militia plots, conspiracy-driven assassination attempts, ideologically motivated mass shootings, and violence tied to anti-fascist protest.

In practice, the memo narrows the field to “Antifa aligned extremists.” It names “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” as core drivers and instructs all federal prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and grant-making components to treat those strands as the priority focus for Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

It then builds machinery around that choice.

First, the memo directs components to create and maintain lists of “domestic terrorism organizations” and “Antifa aligned entities.” Field offices are instructed to map local groups, coalitions, and supporting networks. These lists are compiled in secret according to opaque criteria. They do not come with any formal notice, hearing, or other means for redress. They live inside internal executive branch systems, shaping how resources are used and how names are flagged.

This sort of direction has happened before. In 1975, the Church Committee uncovered the FBI’s Security Index, the Rabble Rouser Index, and lists of “key activists” that rolled civil rights leaders, clergy, local officials, and students into a homogeneous category of “threats to national security” to be watched for possible detention or disruption. FBI officials and the attorney general himself defended these lists as planning tools. In truth, they were informal blacklists that saturated hiring screens, security checks, and case openings.

While the Bondi memo does not use the old labels, the underlying logic is roughly the same.

Second, the memo directs attention away from other threats that the government’s own leadership has described as acute. Recent FBI testimony has pointed to a sharp rise in nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) and other non-Antifa-related violence, including a plot by a NVE subject to kill the president. The Bondi memo barely mentions these categories. It reduces the domestic terrorism picture to one favored antagonist, “Antifa,” a term so elastic it can be stretched over protest movements, community defense groups, and online networks that have never engaged in violence.

When a policy directive targets one ideological family and leaves others to the footnotes, it sheds any pretense of neutrality.

Third, the memo calls for a dedicated Antifa tip line, backed by additional funding and reward authorities. The clear message to the public and to local partners is that reports tied, however loosely, to “Antifa ideology” are especially welcome. Anyone inclined to see their neighbor, local organizer, or rival as part of that world now has a privileged channel for that suspicion and a monetary incentive to use it. The Church Committee devoted long sections to the way informant systems and local “red squads” generated torrents of raw allegations based on lawful speech and association. Those feeds poured into federal files and, once there, tended to justify more and deeper surveillance.

A tip line organized around a vague ideological label invites that history to repeat itself.

Fourth, the memo directs intelligence analysts to produce a national Antifa product. More specifically, analysts are told to identify “nodes,” “cells,” “funders,” and aligned institutions and to assemble a unified picture for policymakers. Analysts are not asked, in the first instance, what the domestic terrorism data show. They are handed the answer and ordered to build out the supporting detail.

The lessons of COINTELPRO, Army domestic watch centers, and other programs are clear. When leadership decides in advance which movements count as threats and then tasks analysts to fill in the map, intelligence turns into confirmation work. Breadth becomes the goal. Doubt is treated as a gap to be filled, not a reason to reconsider the frame.

And fifth, the memo reverses earlier cuts to grant making offices and directs them to surge money toward state and local work on Antifa-related threats. The same administration that drained support from programs focused on white supremacist violence and crucial prevention work now refills those pipelines when the target category matches its preferred domestic adversary. Investigators and local partners are not naive about this. They know where the money is.

This is what it looks like from a squad room or an intelligence unit: You are working a mix of cases, including race-based violence, anti-government plots, threats to election workers and public officials, abortion-related attacks, and malicious predators lurking in the dark web. Then, Main Justice sends down a memo, paired with fresh funding and reporting requirements, that essentially says: this is the category we care about most. You are not ordered to stop other work, but you are expected to have answers about Antifa entities, Antifa tips, Antifa products, and Antifa grants.

Could an individual supervisor resist that pull? In theory, yes. But in practice, career officials are not free agents. They respond to what Main Justice measures, funds, and asks about in briefings. When a memo like this one becomes the reference point for oversight visits, budget justifications, and performance reviews, it shapes behavior—even if no one ever orders an agent to ignore a different threat.

That is how a written policy rebalances an entire program. 

How the Memo Bends and Breaks the Rules

The Justice Department drafted the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations in response to the Church Committee’s account of domestic intelligence excess. These guidelines rest on several simple principles.

First, the government may not open or extend an investigation based only on a person’s exercise of rights such as speech, religion, or association. There generally must be specific, articulable facts suggesting a federal crime or a clear threat to national security. Second, the intensity of an investigation and the tools used must be tied to that factual basis. Third, investigators are supposed to focus on threats, not on broad ideological categories.

The Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), which implements those rules inside the FBI, repeats the point in practical language: Ideology alone is not a sufficient reason to open an investigation and cannot be the sole basis to deploy intrusive investigative techniques.

The Bondi memo strains these rules in several ways. When it tells components to build lists of Antifa-aligned entities based on “ideological indicia,” it invites record keeping on the basis of belief and association as such. When it singles out one ideological adversary and leaves other acknowledged threat streams outside its frame, it undermines any claim that the program is guided by a neutral view of the threat landscape. When it directs grant money, rewards, and analytic tasking toward that same ideological bucket, it creates a set of incentives that run against the Attorney General’s Guidelines’ insistence on factual predication and proportionality.

Tucked into a footnote, the memo includes the expected disclaimer that the department does not investigate people solely for First Amendment activity. That sentence is technically accurate, and it will be quoted in oversight hearings. It does not change the effect of a policy that tells agents and analysts, through every operational signal that matters, to build a domestic terrorism program around one broad set of ideas.

The Awful Irony of the National Security Strategy

Prior to the release of the second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), Bondi’s memo could have been viewed as just more dry internal guidance for Justice Department employees. But paired alongside the NSS—which vows to to reject “ideological monitoring” and pretextual uses of power—that explanation falls apart.

Within hours of the release of the Bondi memo, the White House released an NSS that reads, in key domestic sections, like a civics lesson drawn straight from the Church Committee. It warns that abuse of government power under the banner of counterterrorism is itself a central danger to the republic. It states that the purpose of the American government is to secure “God given natural rights” and insists that abusers of authority must be held to account. It identifies free speech, freedom of religion, and the right to choose and steer the government as rights that “must never be infringed” in the name of security.

The strategy goes on to caution that government powers “must never be abused, whether under the guise of deradicalization, protecting our democracy, or any other pretext.” It expresses open doubt about programs that monitor or correct citizens’ beliefs and warns that such efforts can turn into “elite driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties.”

Taken on its own, that language sounds like an explicit rejection of ideological policing. But taken beside the Bondi memo, which orders lists, tip lines, and tailored intelligence products built around one ideology, it reads like a split screen. One document says the government will not use security rhetoric as a cover story for targeting beliefs. The other treats “Antifa-aligned extremism” as its cover story and then builds the machinery of domestic terrorism work around that theme.

National security strategies are not casual press releases. They are usually the product of long interagency work and are supposed to capture the administration’s settled view of threat and restraint. That is what makes this dissonance so troubling. Either the Bondi memo is a quiet repudiation of the principles in the strategy, or the strategy is little more than a shield for a program that does exactly what it claims to reject. 

More Than History Repeating

The Church Committee’s work demonstrated how easily domestic intelligence programs grow beyond their stated purpose. It documented Army units tracking protest organizers, the FBI’s campaigns to disrupt civil rights and anti-war movements, shared watch lists and detention plans tied to labels such as “subversive” and “agitator,” and vast files collected on lawful political activity.

The committee’s core lesson is the following: When the government builds systems for tracking domestic enemies, those systems rarely stay confined to people engaged in crime or violence. They expand, driven by broad labels and by institutional instincts to gather more information than is needed. And as perceived “national security threats” metastasize, so too does the government machinery tasked with hunting them down.

The Bondi memo fits that pattern. Antifa-themed lists echo the old indexes. The demand for an Antifa national intelligence product mirrors earlier habits of tasking intelligence to confirm a chosen story about which movements are threats. The tip line and reward structure invite the same kind of over reporting and personal score settling that filled federal files in earlier eras. The connection to NSPM-7, which reframes domestic political violence as a national security struggle requiring a coordinated federal response, recalls the blur between law enforcement and political control that the Church Committee criticized in the Huston Plan and similar efforts.

What is different now is the layer of formal language that claims to have absorbed those lessons. FISA, the Privacy Act, the Attorney General’s Guidelines, the DIOG, and now the most recent National Security Strategy all claim to treat abuse of power as a central danger. The Bondi memo does not tear those documents up. It simply works around them. 

Why You Should Care

Unlike the Antifa executive order and NSPM-7, which mostly mapped out broad policy objectives on paper, the Bondi memo functions as an operational order. It instructs agents, analysts, and grant makers what to do next and with whom, and those orders will hit real people and organizations almost immediately.

A campus group that organizes confrontational but nonviolent protests against far-right speakers will find itself described in local reporting and police referrals as “Antifa aligned.” Under the Bondi framework, those referrals almost certainly will become serials in secret government databases. Names may be added to internal lists without any notice, and those lists can shape later security checks, informant targeting, and charging decisions.

A philanthropic organization that funds antifascist legal defense work, mutual aid projects, or digital research into extremist networks may discover that its grantees appear in an Antifa intelligence product, lumped together with actors who have planned or carried out violence. That can alter how banks, auditors, and foreign partners see their risk profile, even if no one in the chain has committed a crime.

City officials who decline to channel local resources into these priorities may be painted as “soft on Antifa” and may find that access to certain grants or cooperative programs suddenly depends on their willingness to feed the Antifa pipeline with tips and referrals.

None of these examples require agents or prosecutors to break the law. They describe what happens when a large system is told, through policy and money, which category of threat matters most.

You do not need to support Antifa to see how easily this architecture can be turned around. Any method that allows the government to build lists, task intelligence, and direct money around one broad ideological label can be reused for another. A future administration could swap in “neo-Nazi accelerationists,” “populist militias,” “environmental extremists,” or “Christian nationalist networks” and run the same play. The machinery would be the same. Only the names on the lists would change.

What Now?

There are steps Congress, inspectors general, civil society, and those still inside government can take now.

Congress can demand full versions of the Bondi memo and its implementation plans, along with NSPM-7 tasking documents. It can hold public hearings with current and former officials and require regular reporting on the use of Antifa lists, grants, and tip lines. Inspectors general can review whether cases opened under this framework were properly predicated and whether other threat categories were sidelined.

Civil society groups, reporters, and defense lawyers can track cases in which peaceful protesters, community groups, or charities are swept into Antifa labels based on speech and association rather than conduct. They can press courts to look carefully at how evidence was gathered, what triggered the investigation, and whether internal labels skewed the use of tools such as informants, subpoenas, and surveillance. Some of this work is already being done.

Inside the Justice Department, career lawyers and agents still have choices. They can insist on appropriate predication before signing off on new investigations. They can refuse to stretch statutes to match talking points. They can record dissent through internal channels so that later reviewers have a clear record of concern.

None of that will matter if we treat the Bondi memo and the National Security Strategy as just another pair of political documents in a noisy cycle. Together they show something more serious: a government that publicly vows not to police ideology and not to use “deradicalization” or “protecting democracy” as pretexts, while privately building a domestic terrorism program that does exactly that under the Antifa banner.

If you were not already on high alert, you should be now.