DEPUTY SECRETARY LANDAU: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the State Department. It’s an honor and a privilege to have you here.
For those of us who grew up in the 1970s, the topic that we’re going to be discussing today is all too familiar. From the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Group in Europe, to the Weather Underground here in the United States, to the Tupamaros and the Montoneros in South America, many of our countries have familiarity in the past with political terrorism, and unfortunately, we’re seeing a resurgence of that again today. And so that is why we are gathered here, to talk about this dangerous trend.
Obviously, we know – the good news is it can be defeated, because it has been defeated. And we can defeat it again. But that’s going to require some clear leadership, and it is my great privilege to underscore the host of today’s conference and to introduce him.
He’s from one of the most dynamic cities in our country, Miami, Florida, where international relations just flows in the air because of so many different cultures are present there. He’s someone who served in the United States Senate with great distinction for 14 years. And he now is the chief steward of policy for our great President Donald J. Trump. So, it’s my great honor this morning to introduce our Secretary of State Marco Rubio. (Applause.)
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you very much. Thank you, all. Thank you, all, for joining us here today. I’m very honored that this distinguished group of people have traveled from around the world to be a part of this important conversation. We’re grateful to you.
I also want to thank members of the President’s team, cabinet that are here today: our FBI Director Kash Patel, who’s here with us, thank you; our Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has joined us as well. You’ll hear shortly from Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and one of his top advisors on homeland security issues as well, and of course, our Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent is here. And – but again, I want to thank all of you, all of you that are here today.
I want to thank the whole team here at the State Department as well for putting this together. It’s – it truly is an unprecedented event on an unprecedented issue – moment, I should say, in our history.
So let me start by saying that the most essential duty of the state – the first responsibility, frankly, of any government of any kind – is the protection of its people, is the protection of its country. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we have militaries. It’s why we have intelligence agencies. It’s why counterterrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented here has all of these things.
We are all very well acquainted as of now, of course, by now with what has been described as traditional terrorist threats. For 25 years, the term counterterrorism – at least in the West – has meant, first and foremost, the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that. On the 11th of September in the year of 2001, 19 men murdered 3,000 people here in my country. Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard London buses and the Underground in the following year. The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular traumatic event.
That made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and the realm of terrorism, the specter of global jihad, was the premier threat to their safety. And so we went to work and we assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are represented here in this room today. And we destroyed the ISIS caliphate; we killed al-Baghdadi, and al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden. And we built intelligence and law enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public even hears about them. Every country represented here today has disrupted a terrorist threat at some point emanating from this source.
Jihadists attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.
For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot – a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized – that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system – I’m sorry – that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.
For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.
It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image – and you all recall this – of a news anchor from a very prominent agency – a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.
The coalition in this room today includes political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions. Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly. Sometimes we disagree sharply about trade, about energy, about immigration. You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of the world.
You came here – you are here – because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80 percent of her body in her own home in Greece, and she died, executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office. You are here today because for five days this winter the lights went out in Berlin, the longest blackout in the city since the Second World War, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.
You are here and you came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs. You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets, because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned. You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.
The simple fact is none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence. Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember – remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.
All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary, so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the 17 November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.
And here in America we remember. We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.
These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it.
And today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.
Americans have seen what those numbers mean – an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.
This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.
It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.
One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without – a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.
For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization – for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.
This is an international conference because we are facing an international – we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.
And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq’s – Iranian proxy networks who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.
Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country; they can host their communications in a second country; they can receive training in a third country; they can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. And so, we have no choice but to confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them.
Under President Trump, for the first time, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror. The President signed National Security Presidential Memorandum number 7, outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt Antifa terror networks and their allies. Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and there will be more designations soon.
In December, we announced Rewards for Justice offering up to $10 million for information disrupting the financing behind these groups. In May, we convened the first Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Workshop, joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner country – nations together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks. The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany. The coalition we’re building together is already bearing fruit, and we are here today to build on that work.
We can – and we must – identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it. Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again. Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick. It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight – fight for what is ours.
It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together. We have done it time and again. We know what we must do, and now we must do it.
Thank you for coming today. (Applause.)
And now I want to introduce someone I work with very closely and has been a leader in this field. He is the deputy chief of staff and one of the key advisors to President Trump. He also heads up all of our homeland security initiatives and understands this issue probably as well as anyone in the United States Government, Stephen Miller. (Applause.)
MR MILLER: Good morning, distinguished leaders and guests. It’s good to see so many familiar faces. And thank you, of course, to Secretary of State Rubio for organizing this conference and for leading this initiative.
Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government. President Trump issued a directive. In our parlance, it’s called a National Security Presidential Memorandum or NSPM – NSPM-7, to be exact – that directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.
It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate end the overthrow of our system and form of government. And we’ve seen this has taken place many times in many places throughout the years, and Secretary Rubio has provided you many examples.
Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, and suffering. It only can travel in one direction. There’s no point at which the left-wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains and ceases progressing. Inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag. It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering in order to establish complete and total control – control through psychological and physical and actual terror. And we have to understand that that is the scope and the extent of the threat that we face.
As Secretary Rubio also pointed out, this is an international network. Antifa, as an example, operates in dozens of countries all throughout the world. They share common networks of funding and organization and information sharing. And so, all of our intelligence agencies and law enforcement entities should be collaborating and coordinating and working together in order to root out these organizations.
One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist, who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.
We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed. So here in the United States, for example, we saw in the recent past clear threats of violence against our Supreme Court to try to shape how they rule on upcoming decisions. The leftist does this with the full desire, intent, and understanding that the threat of violence against a public figure or their family is meant to cow them into behaving or acting or conducting themselves differently.
In the previous administration, those threats against our Supreme Court were met with near silence and inaction. So, you had the combination of a violent left-wing organization threatening our nation’s highest court and the federal government and the Department of Justice turning a blind eye to it. Those are the conditions in which this kind of violence can fester as a cancer and ultimately destroy a society. Nothing that we do works if the threat of violence and terror goes on unchecked. Our political systems don’t work. Our judicial systems don’t work. Our legal systems don’t work. Our jury trials don’t work.
At the same time, we have to understand there’s a real threat that those who are not themselves terrorists – but who support left-wing violence – will create the conditions that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition. So, to be specific, we’ve seen some of our nation’s cities in America, like Washington, D.C. and New York City, something – again, it’s an American term, but it’s known as jury nullification. This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime but the juror, because they’re ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not sentence them to the crime which was obviously committed.
We’ve seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who’ve committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who’ve been brought to court, where clear evidence has been presented against them, that the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons. When you’ve reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has begun to infest your society, where people have created an internal rationalization structure to justify unsanctioned violence against the state and state actors to achieve a political end.
We have to use every lawful and legitimate tool that we have to demonstrate that justice will be served and delivered, and to prove that these kinds of tactics and techniques will ultimately fail. If the leftist learns and observes that their violence and criminal activity helps and ultimately succeeds in achieving their desired political end, they will be endlessly emboldened.
Here in the United States, we’ve seen a growing and deeply alarming increase in attempted assassinations against public figures, most notably, of course, the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, the successful assassination attempt against Charlie Kirk, many others. This is a fatal cancer to civilization. And the greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat.
If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives. That is the level of dedication and urgency that is required. And the greatest threat is that even though there are far more of us, there are far more people who believe in order and civilization and liberty and the rule of law, is that if we are softer than those who seek to end us, then the smaller but more radical minority will succeed.
It is easy to dismiss what I am saying and to say surely it cannot be that bad; it cannot be that dire. But again, I point to the examples in our own country, where, for example, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been duly statutory authorized to carry out routine enforcements of immigration law, has been subjected to an over 8,000 increase – 8,000 percent increase in violent assaults. These are not one-off episodes. This is repeat, systemic, organized, funded insurrection, an armed resistance against the federal government. There was a sniper from a sniper’s nest who, using an assault rifle, tried to shoot ICE officers in Dallas, Texas.
These are the episodes that we’re talking about, where we have had repeated, direct, violent attacks on federal law enforcement in order to veto the ballot box with violence. And the leftist justifies this violence to himself by saying that they alone are the arbiters of what is right or wrong – not the law, not history, not civilization, not public opinion, and certainly not God. The leftist assumes for himself judge, jury, executioner.
But let’s not pretend for a moment that these radical leftists, these terrorists, are operating from a place of sincere political conviction. Sure, there are plenty of useful idiots that they use who may believe these discredited ideologies. The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. And they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.
It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled – to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that? Why? If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating – why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected. You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living. This so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation, although they’re incredibly important. It’s about normal, healthy, ordered living.
And the violent leftist, for these deep-seated reasons, going back to the earliest wisdom taught to us in the Bible about coveting – and I’m not talking about rich versus poor. I’m talking about a much deeper kind of coveting – coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple, truthful way they live their lives, people that they look at who are happy and ordered and peaceful and contributing to their communities. That burns an ember in them, and that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.
And you might say, again, you’re describing a future that seems impossible to conceive of. When it comes to preventing these horrors, it is the burden and the duty of good people of all walks of life to understand that you will always be accused of raising the alarm too loudly. If you wait until the point where the worst outcome is so obvious that no one can deny it, you’ve already lost the battle. That’s the fundamental point. If you say I will not raise this alarm until the threat is so present and so clear and so obvious and so imminent that none can deny it – well, it’s already too late. It’s already too late. I would rather prevent a threat from occurring and be accused for the rest of my life of having falsely raised the alarm, knowing in myself that I was right, than for fear of being judged having waited too long until the point of no return has been crossed.
The good news is that we are far away from the point of no return. So all of us should organize together and work together for the good and the benefit of all the people in our societies, of all walks of life, of all persuasions, to deliver for them what they are justly entitled to, which is to live with safety, with fundamental human dignity, and with the ability to live in peace and harmony with their families and neighbors. Thank you all and God bless. (Applause.)
MODERATOR: Your Excellencies and distinguished guests, United States Secretary of the Treasury, the Honorable Scott Bessent. (Applause.)
SECRETARY BESSENT: Good morning. And before I proceed, I’m going to go off script for a minute, which is always dangerous, but I’m going to remind everyone in this room and all the media that I was the subject of an assassination attempt February of 2024[1] by an addled left-wing activist two hours after being sworn into my job. So any of you who want to report that this is a fiction and does not exist, be there for the sentencing this August.
So good morning. Thank you, Secretary Rubio, for convening this ministerial and for the invitation to be here. We are here together because the resurgence of political terrorism, transnational in design and far left in doctrine, is no longer the concern of any one nation. It demands a response that draws upon the distinct and combined strengths of every government represented here today – every government.
Ours begins where every campaign of terror does: it’s financial lifeblood. And at President Trump’s direction, the United States Treasury is bringing the full weight of our authorities to defend the integrity of the U.S. global financial systems. More than 20 years ago, in the wake of 9/11, Treasury became the first finance ministry in the world to establish an office dedicated to disrupting the funding networks of terrorist organizations. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, referred to as TFI, was created in recognition of the reality that America’s financial system is essential to its national security. TFI’s mandate to identify, disrupt, and disable illicit foreign funds that threaten our homeland has become one of the Treasury’s defining responsibilities.
And today, we are extending that abiding mission to meet an evolving threat. The resurgence of organized political terrorism has long occupied a blind spot. The international community has struggled to identify this danger, much less defeat it. But as the threat of terrorism evolves, the institution tools that defend against it must adapt. We once understood terrorism principally as an external menace. That is no longer the world we inhabit. Increasingly, we are confronting sophisticated, organized networks across borders to incite violence within them.
Meanwhile, old ideological boundaries are now giving way to new operational alliances. The unified front between international Marxism and radical Islamic movements need not share the same ultimate vision to share the same immediate enemy of free and self-governing societies. That convergence should concern every government represented in this room. These terrorists understand an enduring truth. Societies are rarely subverted from afar until they have first been weakened from within.
So, as it tears at the social fabric that allows our societies to function, left-wing terrorism is the visible manifestation of a much broader and more insidious effort to undermine the philosophies that built Western civilization and sustain all we hold dear. Some of these activities are overt: bombings, assassinations, and organized violence in our streets. Others are quieter: campaigns to suppress speech, intimidate political opposition, and sabotage our national institutions.
Of course, whatever form they take, none of these attacks sustain themselves. Violence requires money, channels through which funding can move, and institutions behind which it can hide. Increasingly, legitimate nonprofit and charitable structures are being exploited as a mechanism to conceal the movement of illicit funds to support political terrorism. For Treasury, the application of our authorities to combat these networks represents the natural evolution of our mission.
Through our Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and IRS-CI, we have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities. And now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home. Like every form of illicit finance, these networks rely on the global financial system. It is our mandate to deny terrorist groups access to those channels.
Now, we think of nonprofits and charities as good, altruistic organizations, and most of them are. We think they represent the very best of civil society. Many of them do. But the very qualities that make these institutions worthy of the public’s trust can also make them appealing to those who endeavor to exploit them. At President Trump’s direction, Treasury is expanding its efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance. We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, where charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign influence activity, and how those entrusted with stewardship of these organizations have instead enabled violence.
Where the evidence leads, we will not hesitate to follow. And of course, we will hold these organizations, officers, directors accountable. And just as a financial institution must know their clients, they must know their grantees. That work is well underway. In the fall, the United States designated four far-left Antifa extremist groups abroad as Foreign Terrorist Organization, denying them access to the U.S. financial system and depriving them of resources they need to carry out attacks.
Meanwhile, in this administration alone, OFAC has also sanctioned 17 sham charities and nonprofit organizations for funding Hamas’s terrorist activities and operations. As Treasury continues to map and disrupt the flow of funding that enables these entities to operate, no terror organization should delude itself into the belief that its financing lies beyond our reach. No facilitator should assume that anonymity confers impunity, and no jurisdiction should expect to enable or harbor these activities without consequence.
To be clear, in the fight against domestic terrorism, we must respect the constitutional rights, freedom of speech, association, and assembly of all Americans. As such, it is important to emphasize that Treasury will act based on suspected unlawful conduct by these terror organizations, not because of their beliefs or ideologies. At Treasury, this work is mission-critical, but we cannot do it alone. The threat is transnational. Our response must be no less so.
Indeed, our cooperation must be as disciplined as in networks we seek to dismantle. The global financial system is one of the great achievements of the modern world, and we never must allow it to become a sanctuary for those who seek to subvert it. So, on behalf of the United States Treasury, let there be no uncertainty about the work before us and the resolve with which we will undertake it.
We will identify illicit funding, however artfully it is concealed. We will dismantle the networks that season political terrorism, however respectable their fronts may be. We will pursue those who enable political violence, however distant their jurisdictions, and we will deepen our collaboration with every nation represented in this room for as long as this work requires. This is our commitment, and we ask that you make yours, too.
Secretary Rubio, thank you again for convening us here this morning. Let us work together to translate the spirit of this ministerial into a commitment that endures well beyond it. And let us deny our adversaries the one thing on which they count most: that those of us assembled in this room will grow weary in our cooperation before they do.
Thank you all for being here today, and the U.S. Treasury looks forward to working with you. Thank you. (Applause.)
DEPUTY SECRETARY LANDAU: Thank you, Secretary Bessent. Thank you also to Homeland Security Advisor Miller and to Secretary Rubio. These are obviously very important topics.
We’re looking very much forward to the panels today that will involve many of your countries. Again, I just want to thank those of you who have come here from a long distance. Looking around the room at the names of the various countries that are represented here, really we’re seeing countries from all over the world who have come here. We look forward to sharing – continuing to share our perspectives on these issues. We look forward to hearing your perspectives on these issues.
So, I’m very much looking forward to taking some of the issues that were posited by our speakers this morning and continuing these discussions with all of you in the panels that will take place throughout the day.
I think now we have a break for about – for a number of minutes, and then we will resume with the first panel shortly. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
MODERATOR: Your excellencies and distinguished guests, this concludes our opening session. Panel Session 1 will commence at 10:45 a.m. Thank you.
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