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As COVID raged<\/span> across northern California in March 2020, a pair of farm industry groups were worried about a different threat: animal rights activists.<\/p>\n Citing an FBI memo warning that activists trespassing on factory farms could spread a viral bird disease, the groups wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom to argue that their longtime antagonists were more than a nuisance. They were potentially terrorists threatening the entire food chain.<\/p>\n \u201cThe safety of our food supply has never been more critical, and we must work together to prevent these clear threats of domestic terrorism from being realized,\u201d the groups wrote.<\/p>\n A coalition of transparency and animal rights groups on Monday released that letter, along with a cache of government documents, to highlight the tight links between law enforcement and agriculture industry groups.<\/p>\n Activists say those documents show an unseemly relationship between the FBI and Big Ag. The government\u2013industry fearmongering has accelerated with the spread of bird flu enabled by the industry\u2019s own practices<\/a>, they say.<\/p>\n The executive director of Property of the People, the nonprofit that obtained the documents via public records requests, said in a statement that the documents paint a damning picture.<\/p>\n \u201cTransparency is not terrorism, and the FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cFactory farms are a nightmare for animals and public health. Yet, big ag lobbyists and their FBI allies are colluding to conceal this cruelty and rampant disease by shifting blame to the very activists working to alert the public,\u201d Ryan Shapiro said. \u201cTransparency is not terrorism, and the FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.\u201d<\/p>\n Industry groups did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, the FBI defended its relationship with \u201cmembers of the private sector.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal is to protect our communities from unlawful activity while at the same time upholding the Constitution,\u201d the agency said in an unsigned statement. \u201cThe FBI focuses on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.\u201d<\/p>\n The dozens of documents trace the industry\u2019s relationship with law enforcement agencies over a period stretching from 2015, during James Comey\u2019s tenure as FBI director, to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the more recent outbreak of bird flu<\/a>, also known as avian influenza.<\/p>\n Animal rights activists have long said that federal law enforcement seems determined to put them in the same category as Al Qaeda. In the 2000s, a wave of arrests of environmental and animal rights activists \u2014 who sometimes took aggressive actions such as burning down slaughterhouses and timber mills \u2014 was dubbed \u201cthe Green Scare<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The law enforcement focus on animal rights groups continued well after Osama bin Laden\u2019s death, news clippings and documents obtained by Property of the People show.<\/p>\n In 2015, a veterinarian with the FBI\u2019s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate told a trade publication, Dairy Herd Management, that eco-terrorists were a looming threat.<\/p>\n \u201cThe domestic threat in some ways is more critical than international,\u201d Stephen Goldsmith said. \u201cAnimal rights and environmental groups have committed more acts of terrorism than Al Qaeda.\u201d<\/p>\n Four years later, emails obtained by Property of the People show, Goldsmith met with representatives of a leading farm trade group, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, at a government\u2013industry conference.<\/p>\n The meeting happened in April 2019, and within weeks the AAA\u2019s president was warning Goldsmith in an email about planned protests by \u201cby the extremist group Direct Action Everywhere,\u201d a Berkeley-based group that conducts \u201copen rescues<\/a>\u201d of animals.<\/p>\n Within months, the FBI was touting the threat from animal rights groups in stark terms in an official communication: the intelligence note partially produced by Goldsmith\u2019s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.<\/p>\n The August 2019 note written with the FBI Sacramento field office said activists were accelerating the spread of Virulent Newcastle disease, a contagious viral disease afflicting poultry and other birds.<\/p>\n The note claimed that activists were failing to follow proper biosafety protocols as they targeted different farms, and could spread the disease between farms on their clothes or other inanimate objects. While the note did not point to genetic testing or formal scientific analysis to back up this assertation, it said the FBI offices had \u201chigh confidence\u201d in their assessment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Activists have rejected the idea that they are not following safety protocols, pointing to protests where they have donned full-body disposable suits.<\/p>\n The most withering criticism of the FBI note may have come from another law enforcement agency, however. Four months after the FBI document came out, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center rebutted the idea that activists were spreading disease.<\/p>\n Those activists, the Bay Area-based fusion center<\/a> said in the note to local law enforcement, were nonviolent and posed a \u201cdiminishing threat to law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n Citing the activists\u2019 use of safety precautions and U.S. Department of Agriculture research, the fusion center said that \u201canimal rights activists are probably not responsible\u201d for any of the Virulent Newcastle disease outbreaks.<\/p>\n Emails obtained by Property of the People suggest that the FBI regularly shared information with the Animal Agriculture Alliance, as both sought to spotlight the threat of animal rights activists. As new animal disease outbreaks occurred, the activists were regularly cast as potential vectors.<\/p>\n The nonprofit trade group, based in Washington, D.C., describes itself as an organization that defends farmers, ranchers, processors, and other businesses along the food supply chain from animal rights activists, on whom it regularly distributes monitoring reports to its members.<\/p>\n The industry\u2019s concerns grew<\/a> in 2020, as activists created a nationwide map of farms<\/a>, dubbed Project Counterglow, that served as reference for locating protest sites.<\/p>\n The AAA\u2019s president, Hannah Thompson-Weeman, sent out an email to industry leaders hours after the map was published.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is obviously extremely troubling for a lot of reasons. We are contacting our FBI and DHS contacts to raise our concerns but we welcome any additional input on anything that can be done,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In multiple emails, Goldsmith, the FBI veterinarian, distributed to other FBI employees emails from the AAA warning about upcoming protests by the activist outfits, including Direct Action Everywhere.<\/p>\n Another email from a local government agency in California showed that the AAA sent out a \u201cconfidential\u201d message to members in June 2023 asking them to track and report \u201canimal rights activity.\u201d<\/p>\n The trade group provided members with a direct FBI email address for reporting what it called ARVE: \u201canimal rights violent extremists.\u201d<\/p>\n The AAA was not the only industry group using the FBI as a resource. The March 2020 letter to Newsom casting activists as potential terrorists was penned by the leaders of the California Farm Bureau Federation<\/a> and Milk Producers Council. Those groups did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n As the bird flu outbreak ramped up in 2022 and beyond, the industry\u2019s claims that animal rights activists could spread disease were echoed by government officials, emails obtained by Property of the People show.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
A Federal Focus<\/h2>\n
Links to Industry<\/h2>\n