Trump's DOJ Spreads Fear With ANTIFA Charges | Ken Klippenstein | TMR

[00:00:00]And we are joined once again by friend of the show, Ken Clippenstein, independent journalist covering security and US politics at Clip News on Substack. Ken is one of the most important independent journalists in the country. Uh Ken, welcome back to the show.

[00:00:15]>> Hey Emma, good to be back.

[00:00:17]>> Good to see you. Um, and I'm glad we have you on today because these charges that are being leveled against these protesters uh who were protesting ICE are really alarming and the way that the federal government is targeting them is equally alarming. Uh, you've done so much reporting on this. NSPM7. This is the basis by which the feds are using uh to the the the legal basis they're using to charge these protesters. Let's start from the beginning. What is NSPM7? Um and what does it direct federal law enforcement agencies to do?

[00:00:55]>> It stands for National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. They're often classified. for whatever reason. This one wasn't. But in a sentence, what it does is it tells the entirety of the federal government to start making counterterrorism cases against individuals. And um they're supposed to find these cases by monitoring speech, different forms of speech that NSPM7 says are indicators of future acts of terrorism. And if you look at those forms of speech, they are very broad.

[00:01:22]They're they're categories that describe millions of people. It's not membership in a group like al-Qaeda or ISIS um like is how you know terrorism has been defined historically. It is things like anti-Christian sentiment, anti-American sentiment, anti-traditional family values, whatever that means, sentiment.

[00:01:38]I mean these these really broad designators that um when the order was first promulgated last year after and in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk um I was trying very hard to draw attention to it. I appreciate you having me on the show. Um, other independent media were great about seeing seeing what was seeing the writing that was on the wall, but mainstream media largely wrote it off, I think, just because it reads [snorts] so over the top and ridiculous that I think there was this impression that it was like, "Well, how are you going to implement that? This is more Trump bluster. What's actually going to happen?" Well, now we see uh what happens because, you know, it's not like he signs it and the next day you're rounding people up. It takes time for the FBI and the other federal law enforcement intelligence agencies to pull together evidence to try to make a case that they have some hope of at least getting a grand jury to sign off on. We'll see what happens with the um whether or not a jury um upholds the upholds the charges. But the fact that these, you know, 16 people have been dragged in front of court, have their lives upended, had the word terrorism put next to their names all over the news, that it that has always been, you know, my biggest concern about this is the chilling effect that it's going to have on speech and people that look at it and say, "Maybe I don't want to go to protest. I don't want something like that to happen to me." But so in a nutshell, that's what that's what NSPM7 is.

[00:02:53]>> How can a directive of this manner have legal weight, the legal weight that's being assigned to it? I mean, it's not in the law. This is just Trump kind of directing the FBI to focus more on these kinds of cases. And as you mentioned, this is about anti-Christian views, anti-American views, uh violence on the radical left. It's a very much about targeting the left and protesters on that end specifically. But uh a presidential directive in this manner, it doesn't necessarily it it doesn't it's not written into law. Um so what does it do? Why is it so harmful even if it's not codified?

[00:03:34]>> Yeah. Let's the FBI and other federal agencies start to collect intelligence and pull together things. Basically, predicate investigations absent a crime.

[00:03:43]Counterterrorism is kind of a propaganda word. I try to avoid using it in my articles because what it is is a euphemism for pre-rime, which is an actual crime has not been committed.

[00:03:54]Typically, when you're, you know, law enforcement, what you're trying to do is find, okay, here's the evidence of the crime that's been committed, and like you're saying, they can point to a statute or or or law that was that they think was broken, pull together evidence, present to a judge. In counterterrorism, you don't need that.

[00:04:09]You can uh you can look at what are called indicators, which is itself another kind of euphemism for speech that they think uh is indicative of a future crime being committed. And the whole point of counterterrorism, um, you know, if that sounds controversial, it should be, but the the whole idea of it is you reserve it for the most serious crimes like 9/11 that are so unthinkable that it's like, okay, we have to take the gloves off and and pursue them aggressively. Whatever you whatever you think of that, and I have plenty of skepticism of counterterrorism, it's a completely different thing to talk about that in relation to ISIS and al-Qaeda, groups with like funding and organizational structure and actual like mission to conduct, you know, mass attacks. And now they're applying it to these groups that it's like they haven't killed anybody. There's, you know, I looked at the complaint. There's not strong evidence that they even So if you look at So how how is this being used then given that it's not a law, they're using that to open the investigation.

[00:05:03]And once they've opened the investigation and looked at things and try to pull evidence together, they charged them under a law that does exist. So in these cases, um, one of the felony charges isn't NSPM7. Again, that's just the way that you predicate the investigation. the charges are impeding federal law enforcement. So, they're trying to make the case that these protesters um either by, you know, doxing people or posting information about them that, you know, the federal government saying, "Oh, this is impeding our ability to conduct ICE operations."

[00:05:30]So, they don't need NSPM7 to be in the law for it to be a way that they can take advantage of other laws that are already on the books to go after people with. And that's what they're doing here. Basically, then the NSPM7 is a directive to tell the feds that this is the group of people that you should be looking into to basically select a pool and then find certain crimes in that pool of people. Um, what are the charges then stemming from that focus that are being leveled against these over a dozen protesters in Minnesota?

[00:06:08]>> Well, they vary. Um, in some cases they're trying to say they're anti-fadjacent, which relates to another executive order separate from NSPM7 where Trump actually designated them a domestic terror group, which in itself is extremely unusual. Um, you know, there terror groups are supposed to be foreign terrorist organizations designated by the state department because it is understood that you can't have constitutional rights be reliably respected if the FBI can just investigate you on these pre-rime bases that I was describing before. But in any case, um, that's that's how some of the group is being characterized. But again, a lot of the case comes down to this argument that they um are impeding ISIS's ability to uh go around and carry out a job. It's the same kind of case they try to make against people in Chicago in CA in including uh uh someone running for uh Congress at the time. So um this is the kind of tool that they've settled on and it was what I was worried about initially which is okay yes NSPM7 is not law but they will that doesn't mean the federal government they have armies of lawyers whose job it is to try to come up with okay what law can we get them on now that we've been able to look at um not just their social media content but um through the Treasury Department their banking information they're look they're going through everything to try to find whatever they can and so when you look at this complaint again people I I saw some other reporting out there like, "Oh, this is shaky. It's unlikely to survive." They ended up dropping charges against a lot of people in Chicago.

[00:07:34]That's all true, but think about these poor people who've had their lives upended and have to go through this entire process. That's dangerous in itself whether or not you get sent to prison over it. And I think it's really glib to see people on television saying, "Oh, what? You know, they won't go to jail. What's the deal?" It's like, try to picture you having to go through this. Like, >> well, they do. They do when they empathize with James Comey and like uh John Bolton and >> the best lawyers on earth were >> 100% but that's who they relate to more than they do protesters who are god forbid they get in the streets and cause all this ruckus like no I mean ICE was terrorizing these communities we should not forget what was happening at the start of the year and why these Minnesota protesters had to come out to protect their neighbors and we had multiple people die. ICE killed people.

[00:08:25]DHS killed people during that time period. And yet, we have had no we've had a a catch-and- kill operation on the federal investigation into the officers that committed those killings in Minnesota.

[00:08:40]>> It's hard not to see this as like a revenge fantasy playing out by ICE to go after these protesters who humiliated them. I did a story at the time interviewing people and I talked to close to a dozen ICE officers and the morale was in the toilet. Everybody everyone I talked to thought that what took place was either murder or something that you know uh the the ICE agents shouldn't have carried out. And so the impression I got was that they were deeply humiliated by those protesters. And if you look at what happened in the wake of it, there were some real achievements in terms of um removing Christine Gnome, who was at the time the secretary of homeland security, which is the kind of uh you know department above ICE that that contains ICE within it. Um they they ended up withdrawing all these border patrol agents that they had sent to um Minnesota. And based on the ICE people that I talked to, it was understood that like wow, we lost we lost this war. And so, um, I I don't have any inside information about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some element of like we have to get these guys for just, you know, straight straight up like shiliating opinion. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, by the way, yeah, this is the same reason that the Trump administration is trying to starve Cuba right now because of humiliation from the past and the way that Cuba has humiliated the United States and has not really come to heal uh been brought to heal and opened itself up to capitalism. It's just like a very faright construction of how the state should operate. It just strikes me like this obsession with revenge and reclaiming uh uh some sort of dignity. It's it's very fascistic in in the way that it's spoken about. Um but that's just a bit of a thematic point to the side of the reporting. Uh there's apparently only one charge that alleges violence and the rest of it is like emotional distress and posting on Facebook. I mean, I'm not joking.

[00:10:35]>> Literally, they literally think doxing is terrorism. That's not a joke. They believe this stuff and that's what they're promulgating. And when I talk to the officers, a lot of them who who even are sympathetic on stuff, they are starting to adopt this kind of paranoid mindset of that, you know, uh post or a joke or something.

[00:10:51]>> Wait, I'm sorry, Ken. Can I just pause for a sec? The doxing part, like what do you mean by that? Because is is this in reference specifically to the officers that were involved in the killings of Freddy and Good that that their identities were revealed by these protesters? No, not them specifically, but just people that are doing like open source stuff where they'll go through federal employees things and just post information about them. They consider that a violent like do you remember when Elon said somebody was posting the open source coordinates of his plane and he said these are assassination coordinates and everybody laughed. Well, turns out after Charlie Kirk in particular, the Trump administration has adopted that attitude in spades. Anything that's completely open information, it's not secret, it's not illegal to publish, they and when I talk to people, they believe this stuff. It's not just a a line that they say. They're convinced that there are these shadowy groups out to get them and that they're going to be the next Charlie Kirk unless they I can't overstate um how sincere the belief in this threat that a lot of people laugh at, you know, like Antifa safe houses and it's like come on. But they really buy a lot of them really believe this stuff and it's it's it's alarming.

[00:11:53]>> Um so how did the defendants respond to these charges? Um what are their like lawyers saying? What is the legal defense against what is clearly in my view an attempt from the federal government to criminalize free speech and protests? It's all of this is protected in the first amendment. All of it.

[00:12:13]>> Yeah. the tendency of, you know, any lawyer is to tell your client not to talk to media and things and that ends up having this perverse there's a perverse incentive which is that's good advice to give your client, but then the public doesn't get to see the fallout of something like this and how it upends somebody's life and what the effect is on their ability to continue expressing themselves politically. Um, so I I think that's something that tends to happen in all these cases. I have so many examples of people that I'll talk to and they'll be like, "Oh, I really want to share this with you, but my attorneys tell me not to." And so as a result of that, I'm not saying the attorneys are wrong to do that, but it deprivives the public of a lot of insight into how um broad-based these efforts on the part of the Trump administration and the FBI are to um carry this stuff out that like you said there's very little evidence for. I mean this is kind of like a subject some ICE agents subjectively felt as though he was in danger or something. And that's, you know, I'm simplifying a little bit, but that's that's a large part of their case, and that was a large part of the case in Chicago, a lot of which has been dropped. And so, I'm guessing we'll see something um similar here. But again, people being thrown away in SuperMax, that was that's not my concern. My concern is they can't do this in response to people expressing their political views about anything. And we shouldn't tolerate that because the message people are going to take from that is, well, I better not express certain political views. Yeah, that I think is uh the the the core here. And um there was a lot of there were a lot of rumblings that Cash Patel was going to get fired. Um, and that doesn't seem to be the case, but he is doing whatever the administration really wants here uh in in in using their strategy of uh going after anybody activists that may be um throwing a wrench into their their policies here domestically. Um, what is their basis, by the way, for calling Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and linking any activist that they feel like to Antifa? Because there is no structure of Antifa. It is just a cobbled together group of anti-fascists that show up when they want to protest fascism. It's just amazing to me because we see how immensely structured right-wing militia groups are, the ones that Trump would tell to stand back and stand by. they have formal organizations. Um, Antifa is not like that and yet the right makes it into that.

[00:14:39]>> Yeah. So, if you look at the executive order that Trump issued last year um, uh, designating them a domestic terrorist organization, it defines it pretty broadly and that's part of what made it so dangerous. I was trying to warn people at the time that even though there's no such group that calls itself Antifa, that doesn't mean that that's how the FBI internally and secretly is going to define it. And how they end up defining it is a lot of those same um criteria that I was talking about earlier which is you know opposition to constitute authority or you can go and read the the list but they've kind of defined it in such a way that they can apply it to all of these you know anti-ICE protesters anti-Trump protesters general leftwing groups. So, I think it's become a catch-all for anybody who's anti-Trump administration um and and ends up not being something where you can say, "Oh, I've never identified as Antifa." That turns out not to be like a defense against the kinds of um spying that they're doing now and which constitutes most of what it is that they're doing. When you see something go to court, that is something they will have spent months or even years trying to develop. The big thing that the the proverbial iceberg here is what are they doing to spy on people?

[00:15:49]Develop informants, pull together financial information, look at social media. Um uh you know, I mention I mentioned in I mentioned informants and that is a huge part of the process of how they find stuff out is they start tasking people to go to groups and come back with information about what they might have witnessed. So that's really at this point the the major part of what's happening. And what's unusual about this case that you have me on to talk about is that's a this is now an instance where we can say see this is what it results in. And this is kind of the first case I think where the justice department has overtly in invoked NSPM7 and said this is the result of that. And I and unfortunately I think we're going to see a lot more of that to come now that we're about a year out from when all this was put into effect and and the FBI will have had some time to pull together evidence and make their cases.

[00:16:39]>> Can you just reflect on that the the the overall theme of how terrorism and counterterrorism and that infrastructure is applied domestically. Now, um, you know, I I I cite this book Homeland by Richard Beck, which was a phenomenal book, but, you know, there's a lot of talk about how like this is so much war on terror. Um, there's a lot of writing about how this is war on terror blowback in many ways. And we see this in the way that police departments were militarized with material that taxpayers paid for in the Iraq war that they didn't have any use for anymore. They overpaid and it would be sent to, you know, your local police department. But that was I think some of the more obvious visual examples how militarized local policing has become. But on the federal level, man, and this is bipartisan, the the infrastructure of uh and this was under Obama too uh with with the NSA. The fact that since the since 911, we've developed this large national security infrastructure that includes DHS and ICE didn't exist before that. and the catching of all of people's data. People warned about this back when there we were there were a lot of liberals on Obama high and they didn't want to acknowledge um the reality that that administration was engaging in this. It's like what happens if a bad guy comes into power and has all of these tools that you need? And I know like Obama did bad things too, but I'm just making the liberal argument here. What happens when a guy maybe a guy like Trump comes into power and he has all these tools at his disposal? You see how this is being implemented? They did this a little in the first term.

[00:18:22]There were informants in the Black Lives Matter protesters and reporting protests and reporting has confirmed that. But this is so much more formal and it's almost like it it's almost like they're sprinting to criminalize activism because they got a test run the first time at how they can use the tools of the federal government in this way.

[00:18:45]Yeah, we're really living under the shadow of 9/11 in a lot of ways because in response to that, we launched what was called the global war on terror, but that was drawn down, I think, under the Biden administration, but instead of shuttering all that, they kept basically the entire behemoth that they had built up. And just to give you a sense of the the size and scope of this thing, they created what are called joint terrorism task forces in every state across the country, constituting thousands of local law enforcement officers who are deputized essentially as um uh FBI agents able to carry out things that someone endowed with federal authorities can. And those are the groups that are being tasked specifically in NSPM7 to go out and and make these cases, collect intelligence on the on the supposed threat actors. Um and that is a system which did not exist before 9/11. They created what are called fusion centers um at least one in every state. Many states it has uh several. And the idea is to take intelligence gathered by local law enforcement and to share that with the federal government or vice versa share intelligence from the federal level down to the state level.

[00:19:51]Something else that was created after 9/11 and which was not set back when the global war and terror was sundown. In a lot of ways, they just took these groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS and just swapped out the bad guy and now it's Antifa and um leftwing groups. If you look at um the National Counterterrorism Strategy, which Sebastian Gorka, the senior director of counterterrorism authored uh recently, I think it came out maybe two months ago or so. It explicitly lists for the first time ever leftists, uh leftwing groups, um trans people. I mean, this is really extraordinary stuff. And I think because of the wackiness of the Trump administration, people are just kind of like, "Oh, this is more crazy talk." But it's like, "No, that's a formal strategy document that um promotions are going to be based on.

[00:20:36]Resource allocation is going to uh be decided off of and is tasking the federal government to say, "Hey guys, you you really actually have to go after this. This isn't just rhetoric. This is like our this is our architecture for the next two years and and and what you need to work around."

[00:20:50]>> Well, uh horrifying stuff. Uh Ken Clippenstein. Everybody please uh check out clip news on Substack, but it's also it's ken clippenstein.com, right?

[00:21:00]>> Yep, that's right. I think I think I'm the only one there. Not a >> I think so. I think so. It's distinctive. Um independent journalist covering security and US politics. We will put a link to that down below wherever people are listening to or watching this. Ken, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

[00:21:14]>> Great. Great to talk to you, Emma.

[00:21:16]>> Great to talk to you as well.

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