Antifa was mainly confined to the punk scene in the West Coast and Twin Cities areas before the 2010's, and their only real notable action in America pre-2017 was the Seattle WTO riots in 1999, I don't think you started seeing Antifa gangs in every major city until the 2016 election and IIRC, the majority of them either spontaneously sprang up via social media or were formed around 2012-2014 in the immediate aftermath of Occupy Wall Street's downfall.
Plus, there was no way in Hell they'd keep anything except the lowest of profiles back in the Bush years, especially in his first term when 9/11 more or less gave him a mandate and even the most liberal of media treated Bush with the kid gloves. You didn't have the large concentration of the Millennial and Early Zoomer SJW's in these Antifa gangs like you do now, it was mostly a small core of Gen X punk rocker douchebags. They were pretentious and smug pieces of shit as punks naturally are, but they weren't flabby dangerhairs or bearded soy-faced pansies either.
Most of the older ones actually fought Nazi skinheads in the 80's, and the skinhead gangs hadn't been fully co-opted by the Feds back then.