thenation | Last week, nine months after the raid, the Department of Justice unsealed new grand jury indictments against Yeshitela, as well as Jesse Nevel, Penny Hess, and Gazi Kodzo—national chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, and cofounder of the Black Hammer Party, respectively—naming them as co-conspirators in an alleged plot to promote the political interests of Russia within the United States.
The FBI surveilled these Black liberation activists and their organizations for years before finally securing a search warrant for their personal residences and other locations connected to the African People’s Socialist Party and the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement. The FBI’s search warrants were based on a federal grand jury indictment, which charged an unrelated individual—Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov—with violations relating to a little-known statute called the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The superseding indictment charges Yeshitela, Nevel, and Hess with conspiring to commit an offense against the United States—specifically, “to act as an agent of a foreign government and foreign officials…without prior notification to the Attorney General” as required by law under FARA. The specific acts they are accused of committing include attending an international conference in Russia, publishing a “Petition to the United Nations on the Crime of Genocide Against African People in the United States of America” after encouragement from Ionov, accepting financial support from Ionov for a speaking tour in the United States to discuss reparations, permitting Ionov to speak during an African People’s Socialist Party event, and publishing and speaking in support of the Russian government. It is worth remembering that African American activists have charged the United States with genocide since at least 1951, when the Civil Rights Congress submitted a similar petition to the United Nations, titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.”
Despite the sensational nature of the charges and the Department of Justice’s presentation of the case, we should be clear: The indictments against the defendants do not allege any intent to commit violent acts, nor espionage, fraud, nor even election interference. Because of FARA’s extraordinary reach, the Department of Justice has been able to selectively invoke foreign agent accusations as a way to silence criticisms of the United States’ role in international politics.
A Dangerous Smokescreen for Political Repression
The Department of Justice is likely to invoke FARA and foreign agent regulations more and more often in the next few years, especially to target anti-war activists and movements critical of United States foreign policy. Already in 2022, the DOJ signaled its intention to broaden the scope of FARA to cover a wider range of activities and less direct agent-principal relationships. It is now more imperative than ever that progressive activists develop a nuanced understanding of the cynical ways that FARA can been deployed to undermine international solidarity and grassroots organizing.
The federal charges against Yeshitela, Hess, and Nevel also come on the heels of a drastic increase in FBI attention to Black organizers. Since 2017, the FBI has specifically targeted Black organizers against police brutality—whom it has labeled “Black Identity Extremists” or, more recently, “Racially Motivated Violent Extremists”—under Operation “Iron Fist.”
Indeed, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated in August 2022 that “the top domestic terrorism threat we face continues to be from [domestic violent extremists] we characterize as racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” As of 2020, this category of alleged “extremists” included “actors who use retaliation and retribution for wrongdoings against African Americans by those they view as oppressors, including law enforcement of all races, whites, government personnel, and others they view as participants in an unjust institutionalized system,” according to the FBI’s threat guidance document.
Given this political context of increased attention to Black liberation organizers, it is safe to predict that foreign agent accusations will also be used more frequently in the coming years as a tool for spying on, intimidating, and criminalizing Black social justice organizations and Black internationalism, as well as other social movements that critique the United States’ actions abroad.
In the face of this targeted political repression, progressive forces should resist the cynical, politicized use of “foreign agent” accusations as a dog whistle to chill and criminalize international solidarity, and should directly oppose the attendant FBI raids and prosecutions when and where they occur. The chilling effect caused by foreign agent accusations is an incredibly powerful deterrent against protected First Amendment activity, and such accusations could lead to financial ruin, as was the case for Du Bois.
We must demand that the FBI immediately cease targeting the Black liberation struggle and other struggles for social justice before its intimidation tactics cause even further damage.
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