As the Trump administration ramps up its targeting of left-leaning people and groups, the prosecution and harsh sentencing of Casey Goonan may provide a glimpse of things to come.
By Ali Winston
By the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area’s hard left, Casey Goonan’s crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV partially burned by an incendiary device on UC Berkeley’s campus. A planter of shrubs lit on fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to smash a glass office window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in downtown Oakland.
But thanks to a series of communiques where Goonan claimed to have carried out the summer 2024 attacks in solidarity with Hamas and the East Bay native’s anarchist beliefs, federal prosecutors claimed Goonan “intended to promote” terrorism on top of a felony count for using an incendiary device. Goonan’s original charges notably did not contain terrorism counts. In late September, US District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, whom they called “a domestic terrorist” during the hearing, to 19 and a half years in prison plus 15 years probation. Prosecutors also asked that he be sent to the Bureau of Prisons facility that contains a Communications Management Units, a highly restrictive assignment reserved for what the government claims are “extremist” inmates with terrorism-related offenses or affiliations.
Although Goonan’s case began under the Biden Administration, it offers a glimpse of the approach the Department of Justice may take in President Donald Trump’s forthcoming offensive against the “left,” formalized in late September in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), an executive order targeting anti-fascist beliefs, opposition towards Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids, and criticism of capitalism and Christianity as potential “indicators of terrorism.”
