Tulsi Gabbard Declassifies Biden ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Strategy

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on April 16 fulfilled her past promise to declassify information related to President Joe Biden’s domestic counterterrorism strategy.

Dubbed the “Strategic Implementation Plan” (SIP), the 15-page-long document details the Biden administration’s findings and action plan to counter an alleged increase in homegrown domestic terrorism.

Gabbard released the documents in response to prompting from conservative groups like America First Legal, which expressed concerns about the Biden administration allegedly “censoring disfavored speech on the Internet by labeling such speech ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ ‘hate speech,’ ‘domestic terrorism.'”

Coming in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, after which the Biden administration claimed that domestic terrorism was the greatest terror threat the United States faced, the SIP represents the government-wide counterterrorism strategy.

Here’s what the declassified documents show.

Four-Pillared Plan

The plan in the declassified documents is based on four pillars: “Understand and Share Domestic Terrorism-Related Information,” “Prevent Domestic Terrorism Recruitment and Mobilization to Violence,” “Disrupt and Deter Domestic Terrorism Activity,” and “Confront Long-Term Contributors to Domestic Terrorism.”

The broad goals laid out by the plan included identifying and intervening with “potentially dangerous individuals,” “strengthen[ing] norms of non-violent political expression and rejection of racism and bigotry,” and increasing Americans’ “faith in democracy and the government.”

The plan called for dedicated research and analysis of domestic terrorism, including any potential links to international organizations or governments. To the same end, it called for increased information sharing within federal law enforcement related to domestic terrorism.

Additionally, this pillar proposed that the government “explore” ways to identify domestic terrorism through financial activity, including through greater involvement with financial institutions and scrutiny of citizens’ financial records.

It also called for the government to “Enhance [its] understanding of how foreign state and non-state information operations, particularly disinformation, relate to the domestic terrorism threat.”

That’s essentially federal government parlance for analyzing the impact of foreign actors online. The Biden administration and Democrats repeatedly claimed that Russian “trolls” were responsible for spreading disinformation and misinformation online.

Relatedly, the SIP reveals a plan to “implement evidence-based digital literacy programming to combat online disinformation and DT recruitment and narratives.”

The plan also calls for the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, among others, to “share with relevant technology and other private-industry companies, as appropriate and as expeditiously as possible and on a consistent basis, relevant information on [domestic terrorism]-related and associated transnational terrorist online content.”

It called for guardrails on information-sharing with technology companies, factoring in “legal, privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties review.”

Many conservatives have long been critical of alleged collusion between federal agencies and tech platforms, with many saying that the Biden administration sought to censor and deplatform conservative viewpoints in violation of the First Amendment.

Social Proposals

The final pillar of the plan, calling to “confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism,” is laden with potentially controversial social proposals.

This section identifies “ghost guns”—unregistered weapons without a serial number, often created via 3D printer—as one such contributor, and calls to “[r]ein in the proliferation” of such weapons, “encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders, and drive other executive and legislative action including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

It also called for “advancing inclusion” as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic to “mitigate xenophobia and bias.”

This would be in order to “address hate crime reporting barriers faced by disadvantaged communities by promoting law enforcement training and resources to prevent and address bias-motivated crimes,” according to the SIP.

Additionally, the plan encouraged “teaching and learning of civics education that provides students with the skill to fully participate in civic life,” and promoting “literacy education for both children and adult learners and existing proven interventions to foster resiliency to disinformation.”