By Sam Ozer-Staton

 On Tuesday, the Biden administration released its long-awaited report on domestic terrorism, a priority that President Biden outlined on his first day in office. The 30-page report, titled  “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” details the nature of the threat, and it makes a number of key recommendations, including investing in additional research and analysis, coordinating information across government agencies, and addressing online terrorist recruitment and mobilization. But, as Olivier Knox, the National Political Correspondent at the Washington Post, noted Wednesday, the report “reveals a remarkable omission: A clear position on whether the U.S. government requires new legal authority to successfully hunt down, prosecute, and imprison homegrown extremists.”

The question of whether law enforcement officials need more legal authority to address the growing threat of domestic terrorism is not a new one. Currently, federal criminal law defines domestic terrorism, but the set of laws codified in the “Terrorism” section of U.S. Code primarly relate to international terrorism. Take, for example, the case of James Fields, who used his car to drive through a group of people at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing Heather Heyer and severely injuring several others. The use of a vehicle to injure or kill is not a federal crime of terrorism when it’s done in service of a domestic terrorist cause. However, had Fields committed the same crime in the name of the Islamic State, with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, he could be charged with a crime of international terrorism.

Of course, that is not to say that there aren’t already laws on the books that criminalize the underlying conduct associated with acts of domestic terrorism. Fields, for example, was charged with — and later convicted of — a number of crimes (including 29 hate crimes), and sentenced to life in prison.