-This is Lake Street in Minneapolis.
-Lake Street is, like, a central ground.
-It's the day after George Floyd died in police custody.
Protests took place across the city.
-It was a peaceful protest.
-There was other people out there that, you know,
wanted to cause destruction.
-People just showed up to just mess with the city.
-You can burn Lake Street in a night,
but you can't rebuild it in a day.
-Over the course of the next two days,
buildings along Lake Street were destroyed,
and false rumors about the cause of the violence ran rampant.
-With the riots and the looting,
we had a lot of out-of-state people.
-You could hear people ask, "Where's Lake Street?"
while we're walking on Lake Street.
-The people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents.
-A viral tweet sparked another rumor,
that the antifacist group Antifa was behind the violence.
Three days later, the President appeared to confirm this theory.
-The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters,
looters, and anarchists.
The violence and vandalism is being led by Antifa
and other radical left-wing groups.
-Experts were skeptical.
-I know there have been a lot of arrests.
I'm not sure I've seen any evidence to suggest
that any of those have been linked
to those who believe in Antifa ideas.
-So we decided to investigate.
-The Antifa, it really refers to a decentralized network
of militants
that oppose what they believe and what they call are fascists,
racists, or otherwise right-wing extremist groups.
-In recent years, Antifa has focused on counter-protests
for big white-nationalist events.
-It's not entirely out of the question
that some white supremacists might show up
at some of the protests
and that could then drive Antifa to show up.
-Still, sorting out who is
and isn't Antifa isn't always straightforward.
-It's a challenge because this is not an organized group.
You're essentially looking to try to identify,
what does somebody believe in?
-Sometimes members carry flags, wear patches,
leave marks with graffiti.
They often wear all black and can be identifiable
by how they organize.
We spoke with eyewitnesses, reviewed dozens of videos
and photos from violent incidents on May
26th, 27th, and 28th in Minneapolis.
We found no clear evidence
that Antifa was responsible for the violence.
-Saw, like, little crowds maybe of people wearing all black,
but at the same time,
I wouldn't identify them as part of that group
just 'cause my boyfriend would go out there
sometimes wearing all black, too,
and it was more of a, you know --
As a little sign of, you know, Black Lives Matter without,
you know, having the wording on there.
-There were reports of some Antifa at different protests,
but they stood back, did not engage,
certainly not in a violent way.
-Records from the Minneapolis police show the vast majority
of those arrested were in fact from the surrounding area
and were for non-violent actions.
At least nine people have been charged in federal court
for crimes connected to the protests in Minneapolis.
None of the charging documents point to an Antifa affiliation.
But the President and the Trump administration were clear.
Antifa started the violence.
-But in recent days, our nation has been gripped
by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists,
looters, criminal, rioters, Antifa, and others.
-Minneapolis was far from the only city
that saw massive protests.
-As I've looked at the over 140 cities
where there have been protests and talked to US officials
within some of the joint terrorism task forces, by far,
the vast majority of violence that they have told me,
by far has been sort of local hooligans,
sometimes gangs, sometimes just individuals
that are trying to take advantage of an opportunity.
-More than 14,000 people across 49 cities
have been arrested since May 27th.
But law-enforcement officials have not established
a meaningful link to Antifa.
More than 80 people have been charged in federal court
with crimes connected to the nationwide protests.
Currently four are known to have white-nationalist affiliations,
including one person charged with killing
a police officer in Oakland.
None of have known ties to Antifa.
An FBI intelligence bulletin, first reported by ABC,
suggested white nationalists
were more likely to be behind the violence.
-We have found, like, significantly more,
you know, right-wing extremists,
whether it's anti-government types,
even some white supremacists that we can say we have evidence
that they showed up and very little, frankly,
to suggest that Antifa has.
-That begs the question.
How did the President come to blame Antifa?
A simultaneous chain of events took place online in the days
following the first protests in Minneapolis
and obstruction of Lake Street.
On May 27th, a viral tweet claimed, without evidence,
that Antifa was connected to the violence at the protests.
-Within a day, there were numerous stories
across the far-right media ecosystem
which alleged that Antifa terrorists were responsible
for one incident or another.
-On May 29th, there were dozens more protests,
and Twitter mentions of Antifa reached roughly 300,000.
By May 30th, there were nearly five times that.
That same day, Trump blamed Antifa
for the violence at the protests.
On May 31st, social-media mentions of
Antifa peaked after Trump tweeted he would name
Antifa a terrorist organization,
although he has not authority to do so under existing law.
Google Trends showed that search interest for
Antifa far surpassed instances of conversation around the group
in 2017 and 2018.
-Search interest in Antifa was so great, in fact,
that it outweighed search interest
in Black Lives Matter during these protests.
-Rumors started to appear on social media
about a wide variety of allegations
about Antifa's actions.
-So whether it's, oh,
Antifa buses are dropping people off at rallies or Antifa
is talking about showing up in the suburbs to create chaos
or Antifa is leaving bricks in cities where there are protests.
All of that has been a coordinated effort
at misinformation.
Frankly more coordinated than it seems
Antifa has been in actually being on the ground.
-Counter-protestors and armed militias came to stop
Antifa protests that were never planned.
Trump even promoted a false conspiracy theory
saying that a 75-year-old protester in Buffalo was Antifa
after he was shoved by police.
-I think sometimes it's easier to believe that extremists
are responsible for chaos or looting or rioting than it is
to just accept the fact that Americans are angry.
-For us, we kind of had to,
like, take a step back and think, "All right, well,
we can't get mad at the people for getting angry."
All you got to do is kind of push them
in the right direction.
-Without waiting for arrest data or other facts,
the President and members of his administration
placed an outsized burden of blame on Antifa
that has led to more chaos and violence
in an already turbulent moment.