US will focus counterterrorism efforts on left-wing groups, Rubio says

The U.S. will push to focus international counterterrorism efforts on "far-left terror," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told officials from over 60 nations gathered in Washington on Thursday, saying leftist violence had long been overlooked. The conference in Washington hosted by Rubio has sparked concerns from Democrats that the Trump administration is politicizing counterterrorism efforts and draining resources from fighting extremism on other fronts. In a speech, Rubio said the Islamic militancy threat was "severely diminished" due to coordinated international efforts but that rising left-wing violence was a "blind spot". "We can and we must identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it," Rubio said, citing a transnational threat from groups who hate the West and target its politicians and infrastructure. The conference marks the Trump administration's most significant effort yet to internationalize a counterterrorism focus that critics say is not supported by data. Latvia's Foreign Minister Baiba Braze told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that the forum also allowed countries like hers to discuss threats from Russia-backed groups and new trends in technology use by militants of all stripes. "What is new is that it's very much a fluid extremist environment where technology enables various actors to radicalize different groups. Sometimes it's leftist ideology, sometimes it's very right-wing ideology," Braze said. Since November, Washington has designated four European groups - Antifa Ost, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense - as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, offering rewards of up to $10 million for information on their financing. Eleven Democratic lawmakers wrote to Rubio on Wednesday questioning the evidence for the new focus on left-wing groups and called the White House's May counterterrorism strategy, which did not mention neo-Nazi or other far-right groups, a "politically partisan document." "We strongly urge the Department to return its focus to a serious mission set that is definitionally apolitical, data-driven, and rooted in reality, instead of rubberstamping the political priorities of extremists within the Administration whose views and policies put U.S. national security - and the American people - at risk," wrote the lawmakers. At the conference, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said leftists were driven by "envy and hatred" and derided antifa demonstrators as "all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism". Rubio also said left-wing groups work with foreign states hostile to the U.S., citing Iranian proxy networks as "increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world," though he did not provide evidence of such links. He also accused Cuba's Communist leaders of having "helped build the far left" in the United States, without offering evidence to support the claim.