(DCNF)—Leftists charged in a suspected bombing plot in California allegedly told an undercover FBI informant of their radical intentions several times before their Friday arrest, even mentioning a “terrorist diary,” court records show.
The paid informant and an undercover FBI agent were key to infiltrating the leftist group Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF) and disrupting its alleged New Year’s Eve terrorist plot, the FBI said in a criminal complaint filed Saturday. Defendant Zachary Page said during a December in-person meeting — which included the unnamed informant and agent — that he was “100,000 percent” sure the FBI would certainly be tracking TILF’s activities ahead of the attack, according to the complaint.
“I kind of had this notebook where I wrote down multiple plans that never happened or got delayed,” Audrey Carroll, another of the four TILF defendants, allegedly said in a Dec. 10 text to the informant on Signal. “So it’s like / my terrorist diary / lmaooooo / I have to get rid of that.”
The same woman gave the undercover operative a handwritten document labeled “Operation Midnight Sun” that outlined the New Year’s Eve bombing plot, which involved detonating bombs at companies across Los Angeles when the clock struck midnight, the FBI alleged. The FBI’s surveillance climaxed with a Friday SWAT raid in the Mojave Desert, where the four defendants allegedly gathered at a campsite to test explosives, officials said Monday.
Court records do not yet list attorneys for the defendants, who made their first appearance in court Monday on charges of conspiracy and possessing an unregistered explosive device.
Sneaking law enforcement operatives into left-wing extremist groups can be difficult as they are often highly focused on operational security, or “opsec,” Center for Security Policy counterterrorism analyst Kyle Shideler told the Daily Caller News Foundation. He has previously advised law enforcement and spoken to Congress on national security topics.
“The amount of time these groups spend thinking about what they call ‘security culture’ is significant,” Shideler said. “They provide education on identifying potential infiltrators, in addition to avoiding technical surveillance.”
The FBI called the informant “reliable,” adding that the person has no criminal history, gave helpful information in other cases and had worked with the bureau since August 2021.
More details are needed to know how the Trump administration pulled it off, “But in general I believe infiltrating leftist groups is a significant challenge,” Shideler told the DCNF. “They’ve more than a [hundred] years of history dealing with police surveillance, including the lessons from the new left terrorists of the 1960s and the eco-terrorists of the 1990s.”
TILF defendants met with the FBI’s informant or undercover agent at least three times to discuss their planned terrorism between Nov. 26 and Dec. 7, the FBI alleged. They then drove in two cars with the federal operatives to the desert, where authorities moved in for arrest, the complaint says.
“What we’re doing will be considered a terrorist act,” Carroll said during the road trip, according to the FBI.
Undercover FBI work within leftist terror cells is not unheard of, though the bureau appears to use more informants to disrupt white supremacist or right-wing groups, according to Ryan Mauro, who studies extremism for Capital Research Center.
“Based on my anecdotal but extensive work with law enforcement on these issues, I do know that the use of informants against these kinds of criminal anarchist and communist extremists happens frequently enough for it to not be uncommon,” Mauro said.
“There might be more criminal offenders inside the ‘far-right,’ partially because the demographic is a bit older on average, so members have had more time to get themselves into trouble,” he told the DCNF. “That being said, I can without a doubt tell you there is more of a focus on ‘far-left’ extremists, but it is warranted based on their growth in size and capability.”
The FBI investigated TILF based on orders from President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi to prioritize targeting domestic terrorist groups, especially left-wing extremists, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials said Monday. TILF’s radical statements on Instagram underscored its anti-government crusade, they said.
“Death to America. Death to colonizers. Death to capitalism. Death to imperialism. Is not violent,” TILF said in an Oct. 21 Instagram post. “Support of these structures is.”
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