Michael German is one of 125 lawyers, former elections officials, writers and social scientists at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. But his last six years of research and his lived background have made him one of Brennan’s most sought-after experts at a time when the nation is acutely aware of the problem of far-right violence.
His role demonstrates how the 26-year-old nonprofit keeps its issue portfolio current. Founded in 1995 by former law clerks of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the nonprofit was created to uphold his ideals of “a fair and inclusive democracy, support for the disadvantaged, and respect for individual rights and liberties.”
According to its most recent annual report, the nonprofit, which describes itself as a think tank, advocacy organization and communications hub, had operating revenues in 2019 of more than $26 million.
It supports voting rights, campaign finance reform, and an end to partisan gerrymandering. But its issues also have included curbing abuses of executive power, defending the rights of marginalized communities and fighting mass incarceration. Its largest funders in 2019—Arnold Ventures and the Lakeshore Foundation—supported Brennan’s justice rights work. One of the ways the Brennan Center has remained relevant is by anticipating future threats to democracy and civil rights through the lens of 21st-century challenges.
Hired as a Brennan fellow in 2014, German says he has “one foot in [Brennan’s] liberty and national security program and one foot in the fellows program,” enabling him “to be proactive in identifying issues that might not be part of the current legislative agenda but are issues on the horizon that need to be developed.”
No need for broader domestic terrorism laws
In 2015, the Department of Justice “started angling for a broader domestic terrorism law,” German says. That drive for more law enforcement authority “picked up steam” early in the Trump years, he adds.
“We discussed how to challenge the narrative... that there is a deficiency in the law around these areas,” German says.
German, an attorney, is also a former FBI agent who infiltrated neo-Nazi skinhead groups and alt-right militias in the 1990s, saving lives by disrupting terrorist plots and bringing perpetrators to justice.
“In the 1990s... nobody suggested we didn’t have sufficient legal authority to do those cases,” he says. “It was confounding to me how this argument was being made... there’s an entire chapter of the U.S. criminal code” devoted to terrorism laws, he says.
“So we decided that I would do a series of white papers” making the case against giving federal law enforcement broader powers to go after domestic terrorism by documenting the extensive legal authorities they already have, and by exposing the flawed way “the government handles white supremacist crimes,” making it nearly impossible even to know the scope of the problem.
Identifying the problem
Over the course of the next five years, German wrote his well-reviewed book, “Disrupt, Discredit and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy,” and three comprehensive Brennan white papers.
It wasn’t hard for the Brennan reports to remain topical. The group’s first white paper, published in 2018, referred to Dylann Roof’s 2015 slaughter of the pastor and eight worshippers at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. That report faulted then-FBI Director James Comey for refusing to call the murders an act of terrorism.
A second paper was published in 2019, after a spate of violent actions against worshippers at both Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques, including the murders of 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh. The paper contended that hate crimes perpetrated by far-right militants needed to be better identified, documented and addressed by the justice department.
In 2020, the same year Black Lives Matter protests erupted following the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, Brennan looked carefully at “racism, white supremacy and far-right militancy in law enforcement” itself.
Brennan’s common-sense solutions seem so obvious one wonders why the Justice Department didn’t adopt them years ago. The biggest takeaway: The FBI needs to get serious about collecting useful data about white supremacist and far-right groups and crimes.
Missing the right data
Data, when it is collected, is done haphazardly, German says. One huge problem is the lack of useful statistics across programs about the number of crimes committed by white supremacists. “If white supremacists murder somebody, the FBI could call that a domestic terrorism investigation... or a civil rights investigation or... a violent crimes investigation, or could not address it at all, and let the state and locals handle it,” he says.
The FBI has the tools to collect this information, German insists. The agency puts out an extremely detailed annual bank robbery report tracking every bank robbery in each state, including a description of the firearms used and how much money was stolen. However, the FBI has never shown any “interest in aggregating data about white supremacist violence,” he says.
Without a sufficient grasp of the scope of the problem, German says, it is impossible to develop a national strategy to address it.
Brennan’s go-to expert on flawed law enforcement
Nothing proved his contention better than the January 6 insurrection. The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol drew a great deal of media attention to German’s work. Indeed, last month alone, German was quoted by the New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News, and the New Yorker. He’s also become the go-to progressive expert for congressional committees.
German’s efforts have also helped local communities. His testimony before city councils called attention to the harmful impact of local police involvement in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
These task forces, German says, operate under much looser rules than those of many state and local jurisdictions. In 2008, FBI guidelines “were relaxed to such a significant degree that the FBI can now go out and investigate people... without any evidence to believe they’ve done anything wrong.”
That puts local police in the position of violating state and local laws that better protect the civil rights of their citizens, he says. Even more troubling: These task forces act in secrecy and with no accountability to local authorities.
He’s assisted grassroots groups in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco and Oakland, California, to successively lobby to pull their local police forces out of these task forces. This effort offers grassroots groups a way “to be involved in addressing these national issues locally,” German says.
Identifying racist cops is not that difficult
German says the problem of racism is systemic. “White supremacy is ingrained in American culture,” affecting “every government institution, including law enforcement and the military, but also Congress and state legislatures across the country,” he says. “There needs to be a better understanding and acceptance of the way white supremacy was foundational to the creation of our nation and continues to have structural impact in our entire society.”
That said, German says the FBI does have the tools to better monitor racist behavior in law enforcement. “I’ve heard people from the FBI claim” that the agency would have to “search the social media histories of all 800,000 police officers across the country” to identify the bad actors, German says.
But he disagrees. “Police officers know who the racist police officers are,” he says. “All the FBI would have to do is go out and talk to the police departments and communities.” People who live in local communities “know who the racist police officers are... they’re the people victimized by these officers, so it’s not nearly as hard as [the FBI] would suggest.”
He adds that the FBI in “its own documents” acknowledges that the subjects of their domestic terrorism investigations often have links to law enforcement. “That’s alarming.”
Leadership at the top is crucial
But while the FBI has developed strategies to ensure that those links don’t interfere with domestic terrorism investigations, he says, “what they don’t have is a policy to protect the public from white supremacist police officers.”
Congress should exercise its oversight powers to hold federal law enforcement agencies more accountable, German says.
Leadership at the top is also crucial, he adds. Attorney General Merrick Garland can immediately address these problems, he says, noting that the Justice Department has been failing to follow a 1990 law that requires it to collect comprehensive data on any crimes motivated by the victim’s race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability. Instead, the Justice Department asks state and local law enforcement to collect this data, and much of it has gone unreported for decades.
The attorney general has the authority to direct the FBI to “gather data and produce it,” he says. “It’s 30 years overdue... The FBI has plenty of resources, and plenty of authority to go and investigate these crimes.”
Astonished by the response to the insurrection
Despite German’s comprehensive understanding of the failure of law enforcement to prioritize the problem of white supremacist and far-right militant groups in the U.S., he was still surprised by what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6.
“I was astonished by the failure of federal law enforcement to have understood the nature of what was happening, and that they would not have been better prepared for an assault on the capitol,” German says.
“This was the third Trump rally in D.C. in three months,” German points out, adding that “the two previous ones were also very violent.”
And he says the protest was called, “Stop the Steal. What did they think ‘the steal’ was? ‘The steal’ was the counting of electoral votes.”
“This was all happening in plain sight,” German continues. Law enforcement “didn’t need special investigative powers to understand what was happening. But the Trump administration was focused on manufacturing [the] threat of Antifa... And that’s where the federal investigative efforts were going, rather than recognizing that the white supremacists and far-right militants were actually the instigators of this violence all across the country.”
