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The Justice Department’s tool of choice for prosecuting terrorism cases involving international groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, the material support statute, has been used sparingly against domestic terror suspects since September 11. The vast majority of the people charged in last year’s unrest, of any ideology, have not been prosecuted using the statute.
Individual U.S. attorneys labeled their own cases as domestic terrorism in record numbers last year.
Instead, the designation was used as a rhetorical cudgel. Trump called perpetrators of property destruction in the week after Floyd’s murder “terrorists.” And according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering organization at Syracuse University, individual U.S. attorneys labeled their own cases as domestic terrorism in record numbers last year, with some heated rhetoric showing up in court proceedings.
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