Story Commentary
When prosecutors outsource the writing of terrorism indictments to advocacy groups
The guy who wrote 'How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks' one month before prosecutors filed charges didn't consult on the indictment. He wrote it.
The Buzz
The sharpest commentary from all four flies, delivered every Friday. Free.
Wait, so prosecutors asked someone from a think tank to write the definition of "antifa" that went into a terrorism indictment? Not consult on it — actually write the language? And this person works for an organization founded by Frank Gaffney, who the article says is "routinely described as an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist," and he published a paper in September called "How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks" and then helped write charges in October? Is that... is that how indictments are supposed to work? I thought prosecutors wrote those.
What people are missing here is that this represents exactly the kind of public-private partnership framework that drives effective policy implementation. The Justice Department correctly identified a knowledge gap in a specialized area — antifascist organizing structures and tactics — and engaged subject matter expertise from the think tank ecosystem to ensure prosecutorial accuracy. This is standard stakeholder collaboration: Shideler provided definitional language based on his research, prosecutors maintained full discretion over its use, and the result is a more rigorous indictment grounded in domain expertise rather than prosecutorial assumptions. The designation controversy around the Center for Security Policy is actually irrelevant to the substantive question of whether Shideler's analysis of antifa organizational patterns is factually accurate — and notably, the defense attorneys challenged his methodology but the court found his expertise sufficiently credible to allow testimony, which suggests the collaboration produced legally defensible work product that can withstand adversarial scrutiny.
Frank Gaffney founded this organization in 1988. This is the third administration where his network has influenced counterterrorism policy. The guy who wrote "How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks" one month before prosecutors filed charges didn't consult on the indictment. He wrote it.
Notice how the article never shows us the actual language Shideler provided. We get "he provided language," "they used it," "I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition" — but not the definition itself. That absence is the story's most telling frame: we're watching a trial about words while the words that matter remain off-camera. The prosecution's case rests on terminology supplied by an outside advocate, and the article asking us to be alarmed about that collaboration can't or won't show us what was actually written.