DOJ removed study from website showing most domestic terrorism is right-wing

Following the Sept. 10, 2025, fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the administration of President Donald Trump threatened to crack down on the “radical left,” including by potentially classifying some groups as domestic terrorists.

People on social media critical of the administration pointed out that it had removed a study from the U.S. Department of Justice website that showed right-wing domestic terrorism was far more common than left-wing or Islamist extremist domestic terrorism. One Reddit thread (archived) making the claim received more than 100,000 upvotes, while another (archived) received another 5,000 upvotes. The claim also spread to other social media sites, such as Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived).

The study, titled, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism,” was published to the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice website on Jan. 4, 2024, during the administration of then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat. The study’s text was posted directly to the website and in a PDF. Both links were archived with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

“In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study’s authors wrote in its first paragraph. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

Attempting to go to the same URL on Sept. 17, 2025, redirected to the DOJ Office of Justice Programs, which hosts the NIJ homepage. When trying to access the link to the PDF, the website says that the requested page could not be found. The study also could not be found with a website search for words in the study’s title, “domestic terrorism.” A Google search for the study’s name, narrowed to .gov websites, did not bring up the study, only the PDF link that redirects to the 404 page. Links to the study from other organizations redirected to the same pages.

The Internet Archive’s archive history for the study’s page showed the study was still available on the DOJ’s website on Sept. 11, 2025. However, by the time it was next saved — around 2 p.m. Eastern Time Sept. 12 — the study was removed from the website, and its link redirected to the OJP homepage. Snopes reached out to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

The NIJ website maintains a domestic radicalization and terrorism topic page, which includes other research conducted under previous administrations, such as an April 2024 report on the role of social media networks in domestic radicalization. The OJP also has a much-older study on right-wing extremism from 1987 still available on its website.

The removed study’s findings line up with other research into the subject. A report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that excluding 9/11, the majority of murders in politically motivated terrorist acts in the U.S. since 1975 have been by people with right-wing ideologies. Even when including the 9/11 attacks, which skews the data heavily toward Islamic extremism being the most common ideology of politically motivated terrorist attacks, right-wing ideologies were still far more common than left-wing ideologies in perpetrators of politically motivated terrorist acts. 

A University of Maryland Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice study similarly found it was nearly twice as likely for a violent act of extremism in the U.S. to be committed by a right-wing extremist than by a left-wing extremist.