A rally held in Portland, Oregon last August by the far-right group Patriot Prayer turned violent after Portland Police Bureau began cracking down on counter-protesters with flash grenades and pepper spray. Newly released communication logs from that day show that while the PPB were aware of a much greater threat posed by “patriot” camp - which included many armed demonstrators, some with criminal charges and violent histories - they still chose to target the counter-protesters, leaving many injured.

In this week’s FOIA round-up, the Pentagon is blocking requests related to Google’s work on military drones, Antifa are labeled as terrorists in an intelligence report given out to law enforcement, and officials in Virginia’s Arlington County are giving advance warning to Amazon about FOIA requests.

Boston’s Great Molasses Flood happened 100 years ago this month. While the cause of the accident turned out to be a faulty tank and warmer than average temperatures, initially reports blamed sinister anarchists intent on violence. A recent Federal Bureau of Investigation report on “Anarchist Extremism” shows just how little things have changed.

Last year, we filed a request for Corey Stewart’s various Confederate-related correspondence, and received it around the time Stewart voiced support for a white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia at the Robert E. Lee statue. Three months later, a much larger rally dubbed “Unite the Right” saw Heather Heyer killed by a neo-Nazi. MuckRock duplicated the original request for emails, with the addition of keywords related to the rally. We received 21 pages of emails, none written by Stewart.

MuckRock’s amazing community of FOIA and public records enthusiasts have crossed another milestone: A user recently filed the site’s 50,000th requests, the 9,486th request this year.

When you send thousands of FOIA requests, you are bound to get some very weird responses from time to time. Recently, we here at MuckRock had one of our most bizarre gets yet - Washington State Fusion Center’s accidental release of records on the effects of remote mind control.

Since last September, MuckRock has been tracking every Homeland Security-run fusion center in the country’s investigations into Antifa and white supremacist groups. Today, we’ll take you on a rundown of the responses we’ve gotten back from California.

Documents from Homeland Security-run fusion centers in California, Kentucky, and Nevada indicate that law enforcement often over-focuses on Antifa other leftist-aligned groups while downplaying the threat of white supremacist violence.

Based on a release from Homeland Security’s Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, law enforcement appear to prioritize cracking down on Antifa, rather than white supremacists or other Fascist groups.

With the resurgence of the American left, we wanted to see whether or not any agencies were tracking the 2017 May Day demonstrations. Documents we received from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis show that Antifa was specifically targeted and that DHS was sourcing its intelligence from a white supremacist website called “Occidental Dissent.”