U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump board Air Force One for travel to Norfolk, Virginia, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., October 5, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
When President Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, he issued a wide range of executive orders — one of which was a full pardon for all of the
rioters involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, including those who violently attacked police officers and members of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Trump, however, vowed to use the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI against left-wing groups.
In an article published by Wired on November 3, reporter Ali Winston takes a close look at the case of Casey Goonan — a Northern California anarchist whose crimes included attacking a federal building in Oakland. Winston emphasizes that although the charges against Goonan originated during Joe Biden's presidency, the Trump-era responses has dangerous implications that go way beyond Goonan's case.
"By the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area's hard left," Winston explains, "Casey Goonan's crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV partially burned by an incendiary device on UC Berkeley's campus. A planter of shrubs lit on fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to smash a glass office window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in Downtown Oakland. But thanks to a series of communiques where Goonan claimed to have carried out the summer 2024 attacks in solidarity with Hamas and the East Bay native's anarchist beliefs, federal prosecutors claimed Goonan 'intended to promote' terrorism on top of a felony count for using an incendiary device."
The Wired reporter adds, "Goonan's original charges notably did not contain terrorism counts. In late September, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, whom they called 'a domestic terrorist' during the hearing, to 19 and a half years in prison plus 15 years probation."
According to Winston, the Goonan case "offers a glimpse of the approach the Department of Justice may take in President Donald Trump's forthcoming offensive against the 'left.'"
That approach, Winston adds, was "formalized in late September in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), an executive order targeting anti-fascist beliefs, opposition towards Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids, and criticism of capitalism and Christianity as potential 'indicators of terrorism.'"
"The executive order, meanwhile, directs the American security state's sprawling post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus to be reoriented away from neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and other extreme right-wing actors that have been overwhelmingly responsible for the majority of political violence in the past few decades, and towards opponents of ICE, anti-fascists, and the administration writ large," Winston notes. "Along with potentially violent actors, NSPM-7 instructs federal law enforcement to scrutinize nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations involved in funding organizations that espouse amorphous ideologies, from 'support for the overthrow of the United States Government' to expressing 'hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.'"
Read Ali Winston's full article for Wired at this link.