The Justice Department has assigned two prosecutors with organized crime and terrorism experience to lead an effort carrying out President Trump’s directive on domestic terrorism and political violence, according to Talking Points Memo, which said a department spokesperson confirmed the appointments.
TPM identified the co-directors as Brian W. Lynch and Jason Kellhofer. Lynch has worked since 2020 in the DOJ’s Violent Crime and Racketeering Section and has experience on the Guantanamo prosecution team, according to TPM. Kellhofer is described by TPM as a longtime counterterrorism prosecutor in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The job is tied to NSPM-7, a National Security Presidential Memorandum Trump issued in September 2025 on “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” TPM reported that the directive told law enforcement to treat beliefs including “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as indicators of possible political violence.
That matters for protesters, advocacy groups and political organizers because the personnel choice points to the machinery DOJ may use. TPM said prosecutors with these backgrounds are familiar with real-time communications interception, conspiracy charges and confidential informants, tools built for violent organizations and terrorism investigations. Applying that toolkit to loosely organized political activity is where the civil-liberties alarm bell starts ringing, loudly and without much subtlety.
The Trump administration has already tested aggressive terrorism theories against protesters. Techdirt reported in March that DOJ prosecutors won terrorism convictions against people involved in an anti-ICE protest in Texas. In one case described by Techdirt, a defendant was charged with providing material support after transporting boxes containing left-leaning magazines. Techdirt later reported that the person received a 30-year sentence after terrorism sentencing enhancements were applied.
Other protest prosecutions have fared worse for the government. TPM reported that prosecutors pursued hundreds of cases against anti-Trump protesters around the country and then had to drop cases when the evidence did not hold up in court. TPM also reported that Trump has personally directed prosecutors to charge critics. Separately, PBS reported that the U.S. government agreed to drop tax claims against Trump as part of a broader IRS lawsuit settlement, with the IRS agreeing not to audit Trump for past tax returns.
Lynch’s public political writing adds another wrinkle. Techdirt pointed to Lynch’s past contributions to American Thinker, a conservative site aligned with Trump-era politics. In posts cited by Techdirt, Lynch wrote about Covid death counts and claimed media organizations would “stop at nothing” to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020.
The DOJ has not, according to TPM’s account, framed the new task force as a general protest-policing unit. The stated hook is NSPM-7 and political violence. The practical concern is narrower and uglier: the same statutes and investigative tools that can disrupt real plots can also turn association, ideology and speech-adjacent activity into prosecutorial scaffolding. Once prosecutors start treating politics as a threat model, the charging documents tend to do a lot of creative work.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
