The Justice Department is investigating protests outside of a Turning Point USA event on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday, which she suggested was part of President Trump’s crackdown on the antifa movement.
Bondi wrote in a post on X that the “violent riots” Monday evening at the California school are under investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
The Turning Point USA event came two months after the group’s founder, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was killed on a Utah college campus. The sold-out event was the final stop on a recent national college campus tour that the group has hosted since Kirk’s death.
On Monday night, dozens of mostly peaceful protestors gathered near the Turning Point event on the university’s campus, and scuffles broke out between police and some protestors, videos of the demonstrations show. At one point, somebody threw smoke bombs, CBS News Bay Area reported.
According to a statement from the Berkeley Police Department, two men were arrested on suspicion of fighting in public. One of those individuals was released after officers determined that a 25-year old man had stolen his chain and he was attempting to get it back.
Two other individuals were arrested by campus police for failing to comply with directions, a university spokesman said. One was a current student and the other had no affiliation with the university, according to a spokesperson. One 45-year-old male attending the event was hit by a glass bottle and transported to the hospital.
Protesters yell at people exiting a Turning Point USA event at the University of California, Berkeley. / Credit: Godofredo Vásquez / AP
In a statement, UC Berkeley said the school “is conducting a full investigation” and will cooperate with federal authorities to “identify the outside agitators responsible for attempting to disrupt last night’s TPUSA event.”
“There is no place at UC Berkeley for attempts to use violence or intimidation to prevent lawful expression or chill free speech,” the statement read.
This isn’t the first time an event featuring conservative speakers has sparked protests on the Berkeley campus. In 2017, a planned speech by right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled after hundreds of protesters gathered and lit fires and damaged property.
Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department, wrote on X that her division will investigate “several issues of serious concern regarding campus and the local security” on the school’s campus.
Bondi referenced antifa in her X post announcing the federal government’s Berkeley investigation, writing: “Antifa is an existential threat to our nation.”
In September, Mr. Trump signed an executive order labeling antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” and directed the federal government to use “all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” illegal operations conducted by antifa.
The label antifa, short for anti-fascist, is widely used to describe far-left and anarchist individuals, though the Congressional Research Service has described antifa as “decentralized” and without a “unifying organizational structure or detailed ideology.” Instead, the group wrote, antifa is a broadly defined movement that believes in anarchism, socialism, and communism.
Last month, for the first time ever, the Justice Department charged two Texas men with allegedly providing material support to antifa, referring to their involvement in a violent July 4th attack at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Alvarado that injured a federal officer. The Justice Department alleged that the pair were part of an “Antifa cell” that plotted the attack with guns and explosives.
Mr. Trump’s vow to crack down on antifa has drawn some skepticism from legal experts, who note that domestic terrorism isn’t a chargeable offense under federal law.
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