WASHINGTON — A new intelligence report delivered to Congress on Wednesday by the Biden administration warned about the rising threat of militias and white supremacists, adding urgency to calls for more resources to fight the growing problem of homegrown extremism in the United States.
In particular, the intelligence assessment highlighted the threat from militias, predicting that it would be elevated in the coming months because of “contentious sociopolitical factors,” likely a reference to the fallout from the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and the increasingly partisan political climate.
Racially motivated violent extremists, such as white supremacists, were most likely to conduct mass casualty attacks against civilians while militias typically targeted law enforcement and government personnel and facilities, the report said. Lone offenders or small cells of extremists were more likely than organizations to carry out attacks, it said.
President Biden requested the comprehensive threat assessment shortly after he took office in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, which laid bare the toxic domestic extremism that has shaken the country. Only the brief executive summary was declassified and made public while a classified version was sent to Congress and the White House.
The top-line assessment echoed earlier analyses by the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security warning of the looming dangers of domestic terrorism, including after followers of President Donald J. Trump embraced his baseless claims of election fraud. An internal F.B.I. report that appeared to have been compiled before Jan. 6 and was published days after the breach predicted the violence to come, saying the events in 2020 were “likely to embolden U.S. domestic violent extremists in 2021.”
