There's something wrong with this Politico story by Josh Meyer that is getting huge play in the rightwing outlets with the claim that the so-called antifa is now officially regarded as practitioners of "domestic terrorist violence":
Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.
It's that after that opening graf you can't find any information about how that DHS "formal classification" is sourced. Interviews and documents are cited, but none of them say that. They say that
A senior state law enforcement official said, “A whole bunch of them” have been deemed dangerous enough to be placed on U.S. terrorism watch lists.and that
recent FBI and DHS reports confirm they are actively monitoring “conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity” by antifa groups.and that federal officials launched an investigation in spring 2016
To determine whether the U.S.-based anarchists might start committing terrorist bombings like their counterparts in “foreign anarchist extremist movements” in Greece, Italy and Mexico, possibly at the Republican and Democratic conventions that summer.They did show up at the Republican convention, where Alex Jones charged them rhinoceros-fashion with a megaphone in one hand and then fled in fright, but escaped with the assistance of the police, who saw no reason to arrest anybody. But there's no indication that DHS and FBI have even determined that there is a group in a coherent sense, let alone "formally classifying" it as anything.
That first paragraph is either a gross editing blunder or a silly clickbait lie, but I'm starting to think, beyond that, that there could be a lot less to this antifa story in general than meets the eye. And here's something else weird: Dr. Google finds me an instance of a government labeling antifa as "domestic terrorists", but it's not the US government: it's New Jersey, according to Kim Kelly for Al-Jazeera:
