The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says it’s investigating a series of alleged incidents across the country in which “Tesla charging stations and dealerships were damaged.” On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi highlighted charges against three people accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla vehicles and, in at least one alleged incident, writing “profane messages against President Trump” near Tesla charging stations, among other crimes.
“Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars,” Bondi said in a news release detailing the arrests, which were made over the last several weeks in Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina.
Civil liberties experts claim treating alleged attacks against Tesla cars and infrastructure as terrorist activity could give federal and local law enforcement broad authority to surveil people protesting Elon Musk’s role in the government. The terrorism designation could also allow Musk and other Tesla executives to access information authorities uncover in their investigations.
Bondi’s announcement comes ahead of hundreds of grassroots “Tesla Takedown” events protesting Musk and his influence in Washington that are scheduled to take place at Tesla facilities across the US this weekend. The demonstrations have multiplied since they began in mid-February, with some attracting hundreds of people each.
Most of the protests have been peaceful, and the organizers of some of them have said that they don’t endorse property damage. But they are happening amid a string of alleged arson and vandalism cases targeting Tesla dealerships and charging stations, including one in Las Vegas Tuesday morning, as well as others in Colorado and Boston.
By labeling these and other incidents involving Tesla domestic terrorism, the FBI can file broader search warrants than in other types of cases. Under the Patriot Act, law enforcement gets “special authorities” while investigating terrorism, including “single-jurisdiction search warrants” from magistrate judges that apply anywhere in the US instead of a single geographic area, according to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office. With a court order, law enforcement can additionally get “confidential education records” from any school or agency in the course of a terrorism investigation, the report notes.
The FBI also has a national network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces that allow the bureau to borrow agents, experts, data, and intelligence from more than 30 federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the “Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. military, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Transportation Security Administration,” as well as local police throughout a particular region.
In addition to these resources, the FBI has access to surveillance technology that local authorities may not, such as social media surveillance tools, facial recognition programs, and allegedly “stingrays” that can intercept data from cellphones.
Most of the powers and resources law enforcement has access to in a terrorism investigation are also available in other criminal investigations. However, some lawyers have argued that law enforcement tends to exercise the fuller scope of its powers more frequently in the course of terrorism cases.
Privileged Access
There aren’t explicit guidelines or laws requiring the FBI to keep companies in the loop when they are targeted in what law enforcement deems “domestic terrorism” incidents. But Michael German, a former FBI special agent and current fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, says the FBI typically does so anyway. “It would be the FBI’s decision to treat the company as a crime victim, so regular exchanges of information are common,” German says.
That could allow Musk and other Tesla executives to possibly access surveillance data or reports on protesters that aren’t available to the public. Tesla and the Department of Justice did not return requests for comment asking whether they plan to share information with one another about the current ongoing terrorism investigation.
There’s precedent for companies not only receiving information from law enforcement during domestic terrorism investigations, but also working directly with the FBI. German says this was particularly evident during the response to a wave of oil pipeline protests in the early 2010s.
Records published by the news site Grist and Type Investigations found that the FBI considered one pipeline operator a “domain stakeholder” in one protest case, which gave the company “direct access to the White House” and privileged information. The company was also invited to strategize with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, National Guard, and local police. And there conversations about how to “ensure coordination and resource management” not only among law enforcement officials, but with the company.
A different pipeline constructor hired a firm to monitor and infiltrate protest groups and write intelligence reports, which were sometimes shared with federal law enforcement and local police, according to reporting by The Intercept. One of these pipeline operators briefed local police along its proposed pipeline route on how to possibly pursue criminal charges against organizers, Grist reported.
Even after the protests waned, oil and gas companies remained close to police and the government. One Canadian pipeline company paid local Minnesotan police departments more than $5 million in 2020 and 2021 for policing pipeline protests. Since 2017, fossil fuel lobbyists have pushed more than 20 states to pass laws making disrupting “critical infrastructure” like oil and gas pipelines a criminal offense, according to records obtained by The Guardian.
Though it’s unclear how the FBI’s current domestic terrorism investigations will play out, Musk and other Tesla executives could ultimately have similar access to and influence over them. When the cases go to court, Tesla could also be eligible for compensation from the government in the form of court-ordered restitution.
Such funds are often used to pay the families of terrorism victims, but German tells WIRED corporations are also eligible. In a successful criminal case, he says he sees no reason why Tesla wouldn’t get compensated. Tesla could also be eligible for money from state-level terrorism victim compensation programs, which receive some funding from the federal government.
Risks for Protesters
Domestic terrorism investigations are often fraught. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have argued that the FBI routinely uses them to unfairly surveil activists and communities of color without adequate oversight.
President Trump has said his administration is taking Tesla incidents very seriously. “People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to twenty years, and that includes the funders,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Thursday. “WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!”
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project, says that instead of “focusing on the most serious criminal conduct that harms life,” federal agencies have wasted resources and abused their authority by “treating alleged non-violet civil disobedience or vandalism as justification for abusive investigations of civil rights and other activists.”
Historically, German says, the FBI has endorsed an idea called “radicalization theory,” which posits that the beliefs of extremists naturally escalate from moderate and widely held beliefs. That logic, he says, justifies the FBI casting a wide surveillance net, particularly when it comes to monitoring activists.
“They suggest that anybody who’s got a similar ideology might be willing to commit the same kind of crime,” German explains. “We’ve seen a lot of abuse of FBI investigative authorities, particularly around domestic advocacy groups.”
Five years ago, the FBI used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to surveil people participating in Black Lives Matter protests, investigating whether they had ties to terrorists. The DOJ Inspector General called the incident an example of the FBI’s “widespread non-compliance” with FISA rules.
German claims that in this case, instead of focusing on people who are alleged to have committed arson or acts of violence, the FBI’s focus could ultimately be scrutinizing people who it thinks are expressing “anger or animosity towards Tesla or Elon Musk.”
