Source: Chris Kleponis/CNP/startraksphoto.com / WENN
A newly declassified report showed that former President Donald Trump and his administration wrongfully spied on Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon in 2020.
According to reporting, an internal memorandum by the Department of Homeland Security that focused on how the agency collected intelligence on racial justice protesters in Portland, Oregon was re-released in its entirety. The 2020 report was first released in April of this year but was heavily redacted. The details show how at the direction of Donald Trump, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, pushed constitutional boundaries to cast arrested protesters in a politically partisan way.
Among the concerning details found in the newly un-redacted report also show Wolf and Cuccinelli requesting “baseball cards,” a term for operational background reports for every person who attended the protests that were organized in response to increases in police brutality against Black people and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor among others.
The request would’ve resulted in thousands in the city of Portland having intelligence dossiers done on them. It was apparently fueled by the belief that a “U.S. person” was behind the funding of the protests. Those reports were then done on those arrested or charged with “violent acts,” and they included travel history, any criminal records, and acknowledgment that “some of their First Amendment speech activity (posts) were still collected.”
Another detail from the report shows that the deployment of federal law enforcement to Portland was undertrained for such a scenario, which led to them initiating violent tactics and a resistance that would be fuel for the Trump administration’s narrative that violent anti-fascist protesters were storming the city. Brian Murphy, the Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis whose name was previously withheld, had an “intended purpose was to use the OBRs to confirm his suspicions that a link existed amongst the arrestees and identify a single individual or group that was “masterminding” the attacks,” the report showed.
The newly reissued report was also prompted by the insistence of congressional representatives from Oregon, including Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. “Now the public knows much more about how political DHS officials spied on Oregonians for exercising their First Amendment right to protest and justified it with baseless conspiracy theories,” he said as he presented the report to the press.