An FBI investigation into an alleged terror plot in Southern California bears the familiar hallmarks of the bureau’s long-running use of informants and undercover agents to advance plots that might not otherwise have materialized, court documents show.

News of the plot surfaced Monday morning in a Fox News report that ran ahead of court filings or official statements. Within minutes, FBI officials amplified the story on social media.

“PROTECT THE HOMELAND and CRUSH VIOLENT CRIME,” wrote FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, a former podcaster. “These words are not slogans, they’re the investigative pillars of this FBI.”

What followed, however, painted a more complicated picture.

The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. The informant and the undercover agent were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests.

The informant, who has worked other cases on the FBI’s payroll since 2021, had been in contact with the group known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front since at least late November, just two months after President Donald Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terrorism organization.

On the morning of December 15, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrests, calling the plot “a credible, imminent terrorist threat.”

Yet the case had the familiar markings of FBI terrorism stings that stretch back more than two decades — hundreds of cases that have disproportionately targeted left-wing activists and Muslims, and, less often, right-wing actors.

Since the September 11 attacks, the FBI has relied on informants to identify and build terrorism cases. The structure has created perverse incentives for potential informants. Their cooperation can get them out of criminal cases of their own and lead to handsome monetary compensation. The FBI’s call is simple: Bring cases, get paid.

Rick Smith, a security consultant and former FBI agent, said confidential sources are essential to investigative police work, but cautioned that they come with inherent baggage.

“They’re sources, they’re not ordinary citizens,” Smith said. “They have either been compromised in some way, or they’re going to be paid. Either way, they’ve got some sort of skin in the game. They’re getting something out of it.”

In the years after 2001 attacks, the FBI created a market for cases involving left-wing activists and Muslims. After the January 6 Capitol riot, the bureau made clear to informants that right-wing extremism was a priority. Now, under the second Trump administration, the federal government’s focus is again turning to perceived left-wing extremism.

In September, days after the terror designation of antifa, Trump outlined his administration’s war on the left in a memo titled National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which called for the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to coordinate with local offices to investigate alleged federal crimes by political radicals. The head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles said on Monday that the Turtle Island Liberation Front arrests stemmed from Trump’s executive order.

Key questions in the Turtle Island Liberation Front case, however, remain unanswered. It is still unclear how the FBI first identified the group or how long the informant had been embedded before the bomb plot emerged — a period defense attorneys say is central to any serious examination of entrapment, whereby defendants are coerced into crimes they would not otherwise commit, a frequent criticism of stings involving paid informants and undercover agents.

“The question that immediately popped into my mind was that: There’s a reference to a confidential human source, but there’s no indication of how that source came to be,” said Brad Crowder, an activist and union organizer who was convicted in a case of alleged violent protest plans that involved a confidential informant. “It’s not totally out of the realm of possibilities that this idea was planted or floated by whoever this confidential human source might be.”