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Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, October 9th. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show congratulating Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert on launching her re-election campaign with a time-tested message centered on everyday Coloradans. Are aliens real? Her newest fundraising email reads in part quote, “strange crafts have been spotted soaring through our skies, defying the laws of physics, and yet the bureaucrats in Washington act like we’re too naive to handle the facts.” She adds, “I say enough is enough. The American people aren’t children to be spoon-fed half-truths or dismissed with vague excuses. We deserve to know what’s really going on up there.” I also want to know what’s going on up there. And by up there, I mean inside Lauren Boebert’s head. [music break] On today’s show, Israel and Hamas agree to the first phase of the American peace plan, and back at home, President Donald Trump vows to dismantle Antifa, the scariest group that has ever, never existed. But let’s start with national security. Actually, what I’m going to talk about today has less to do with national security and more to do with you. Specifically, your right to hold views that the United States government doesn’t like. Like, say, your right to burn an American flag, which is protected by the First Amendment, despite whatever Trump said on Wednesday. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We took the freedom of speech away because that’s been through the courts and the courts said you have freedom of speech but what does what has happened is when they burn a flag it agitates and irritates crowds. They’ve never seen anything like it on both sides and you end up with riots. 

Jane Coaston: Okay, so none of that is true, and in general, any president saying, quote, “we took the freedom of speech away” is bad. Yes, Trump says a lot of things that are untrue, stupid, or both. But in September, after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Trump signed a presidential memorandum you may not have heard very much about, an action that could put your right to hold your political perspectives at risk. National Security Presidential Memorandum seven, or NSPM seven, is a memorandum that redirects the full force of the country’s national security establishment to pursue what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said was quote, “left-wing terrorism.” Here’s Miller speaking on Newsmax about the memorandum last week, where he says that the government is going to go after quote, “insurrectionists.” The irony, it pains me. 

[clip of Stephen Miller] The President issued a national security presidential memorandum, an NSPM, making clear that it is the national security priority of United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks, and that is exactly what is taking place. It is what we are doing. 

Jane Coaston: But that’s not what the government is doing. What the government is actually doing is going after people, including everyday individuals, who believe in ideologies Trump and his cronies don’t like. According to the Trump administration, those ideologies include, quote, “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti Christianity,” all of which sure sound pretty vague. And remember, this is the Trump administration we’re talking about. What it finds extreme might not be what, say, you find extreme. Like the government’s past fights against Al Qaeda and ISIS, the Trump administration wants to disrupt terror before it happens. But in this case, it wants to do so in America, a country that doesn’t even have a domestic terrorism statute at the federal level. This is a very big deal. So to explain more about NSPM seven and what it means for all of us, I spoke to Ken Klippenstein. He’s an independent journalist who has been covering national security for over a decade. Ken, welcome back to What a Day. 

Ken Klippenstein: Hey, great to be back. 

Jane Coaston: So I want to start with Wednesday morning, when the president of the United States posted on Truth Social quote, “The Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also.” Let’s get into this. Is there any evidence that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker are not protecting ICE officers? 

Ken Klippenstein: No, there’s not. They might not be helping them to the extent that the Trump administration wants them to with the immigration war that he’s prosecuting, but that doesn’t mean that they’re undermining them or blocking them. 

Jane Coaston: And I I wanna ask about the claim that there’s been a massive increase in quote “political violence against ICE officers.” When did this first start coming up? 

Ken Klippenstein: Yeah, so ICE has consistently messaged, as has the Trump administration. They’ve relied on this statistic of a thousand percent increase in assaults on ICE officers. And when I first heard that, I thought, okay, you know, that could be true because they’re again prosecuting an immigration policy that is not popular in states where they don’t have support. So conceivably something like that might happen. Um. But the devil’s in the details. What do they mean by assaults? What are they counting as that? So I went to ICE multiple times actually, and I said, hey, what’s your guys’ data for this? How do you define assaults? What’s your methodology? They didn’t respond. I mean, they did respond saying they got the message, but they would just send me a kind of repeat of that comment, maybe with a little bit more rhetoric attached to it, but no actual methodology about it. And I’ve tried very hard to find that, and they haven’t put that anywhere. I think people would be well advised to be skeptical about this because you have Kash Patel going on national TV, he traveled to the Chicago field office of the FBI as part of this big push. And he alleged that something like five percent of Chicago are in gangs, and he had some figure like over a hundred thousand gang members roaming the streets. So this administration says things that to put it kindly are maybe not substantiated by the facts. 

Jane Coaston: Which I think is connected to the reason I wanted to talk to you in the first place. On September 25th, Trump put out a presidential memorandum with the subject countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence. It’s called the National Security Presidential Memorandum Seven or NSPM seven. Can you explain what’s in this directive and what it’s saying? 

Ken Klippenstein: Yeah, so this has gotten tragically little coverage in my view, because it got swept up with designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which happened two days prior. As you said, it’s a presidential national security memoranda. The seven at the end refers to that it’s the only the seventh one that the Trump administration has issued. So these are far more rare than executive orders, and they’re much more sweeping in scope, whereas executive orders often concern the day to day of governmental policy, for instance, removing trans from government documents. So now it’s just LGB, kind of more micro level stuff. A presidential memorandum tells agencies this is our priority set, focus on this for the next three years for the you know remainder of the administration. And um a lot of these are secret. We’re talking now about NSPM seven, but NSPM six is classified. We don’t know the contents. Fortunately, we know what’s in NSPM seven. It tasks the entirety of federal law enforcement to go after what they consider to be domestic political terrorism. Terrorism is handled differently than ordinary crime fighting. In an ordinary case, you would say, okay, somebody committed a crime. Now let’s go and find evidence to try to substantiate before court that, you know, we think this person did this thing. In the case of terrorism, you are trying to preempt crime. And in fact, the phrase in that memorandum says something like prevent attacks before they happen. They mentioned the Charlie Kirk assassination as one example. And so when you approach something as counterterrorism, since no crime has been committed, you have to try to monitor people and offer them the means to commit something or to try to head off something that might happen. So that memorandum lists as indicators of these future crimes, these potential future terrorist acts, anti-Christianity. Another indicator is described as anti Americanism. I think opposition to traditional families, which I you read all this and in the aggregate, it’s basically everyone who isn’t MAGA. 

Jane Coaston: Right. And it also includes anti-capitalism, which I mean, you could make a lot of arguments about what that even means. But–

Ken Klippenstein: Right. 

Jane Coaston: I I want to ask, in your reporting, you mentioned the FBI’s approximately 200 joint terrorism task forces. What had they been doing previous to this memo? And what are they being told to do now? 

Ken Klippenstein: The vast, vast majority of those joint terrorism task forces were established in response to and after 9/11. And what they had looked at was those types of targets. There was what’s called the global war on terror, which is now drawing down. And in the absence of that unifying mission, which had them looking at groups like Al Qaeda, like ISIS, groups that had actually carried out large attacks, have kind of quasi-state infrastructure to be able to support these kinds of operations. 

Jane Coaston: Also also those are foreign organizations. 

Ken Klippenstein: Exactly. 

Jane Coaston: Because technically–

Ken Klippenstein: Yup. 

Jane Coaston: It is a hundred percent legal in the United States because of free speech and the First Amendment to be a member of an anti government organization or a white nationalist organization or a communist organization of some sort. 

Ken Klippenstein: Exactly. That’s the most important point here. What distinguishes it from the counterterror approach in the past is it is explicitly focused on domestic actors, not just looking at speech, but looking at money, donations to nonprofits, it tasks treasury with monitoring cash flow to try to make a case for material support for terrorism. So this is a huge shift. This expresses to the different field offices in the FBI across the country and these joint terror task forces, which also include local law enforcement that can be deputized as sort of federal agents, federal officers. This gives them a set of priorities around which to put budget towards, around which they will be promoted. They’re incentivized to make cases around this now. And so that’s what you’re gonna see. And what’s interesting, these joint terrorism task forces are not restricted by posse comitatis and the legal limits that exist for the military. So when you see the National Guard deployed to DC, we were all laughing about how they were ambling around picking up trash. Part of the reason for that is because they literally don’t have the authority to engage in law enforcement. It is not legal under the constitution to do that. It’s just different than what a JTTF could do, a joint terrorism task force officer coud do, which is they can engage directly in law enforcement activity in a way that the guard and the military can’t, and they can be tasked by the federal government without the support of the governor or state legislature. 

Jane Coaston: So I wanted to ask, because this is all very alarming, but I think that for some people, they might also want to know, and I kind of want to know, would this work? Because my understanding of what we know about the horrifying murder of Charlie Kirk is that the person who committed this act, we don’t know of any connections between him and any larger organization. Nor do we know that about any recent acts of violence that could be attributed to a left leaning individual. Like Luigi Mangioni, I don’t think had any connections to anything beyond a Reddit thread. 

Ken Klippenstein: Yeah. And I’ve I have a good perspective on this, you know, having reported the Mangioni dossier and spoken to a bunch of friends of the two most recent alleged shooters in Utah and in Texas. And what I was struck by was I came to it with an open mind thinking, okay, well, this was a political target. Like simplest explanation would be that it was a political crime. And what I found was way more complicated than that. I wouldn’t say that there were no politics involved, but to cast these as partisan crimes, representative of the Democratic Party or of the left generally, there’s just no evidence for that. There really is none. And um one of the most alarming parts of reporting on the story in interviewing people around the administration was my realization that they really believe, I thought it was rhetoric when they would say, Oh, we’re gonna find out these malign actors and things. But as I started interviewing people, I realized, no, they really believe this stuff. And I think part of it comes from that war on terror. Because when you look at Kash Patel, he was actually a lawyer, I think, for JSOC in the Justice Department, I believe. I can’t remember exactly what it was. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Ken Klippenstein: And then um and he came up on the war on terror, as did Sebastian Gorka, who’s the senior director for counterterrorism. People laugh at these guys, but they have very serious positions. These are not the junior roles that they played in the first Trump administration. Gorka then was like a deputy assistant or something. And and now that he’s in charge of the entirety of the counterterrorist portfolio, and he came up completely in this war on terror framework. So to some extent, I think they’re just using what it is that they’ve been trained to you know, I’ve been a national security reporter for some 10 years now. And they some of the older hands would describe to me how, oh, I came up in the Cold War, and of course we see everything as the Russians, and I had to unlearn that a little bit. So I think that’s part of what’s going on here. But another time, our last interview, we talked about Kash Patel and his memoir. And the clearest theme that came across was these weird um grievances against figures that we’re now seeing indicted, like James Comey and some of these more obscure figures in the FBI. And so I would say that’s the other half of this, which is that they now feel they have a mandate to go after some of these guys that they’ve long said they wanted to do so. 

Jane Coaston: So, I mean, I think that that leads to my last question, which is now that the president has declared, I would argue, some fairly common views, depending on how you term anti capitalism or anti traditional values, whatever that seems to mean, which again, that’s it’s vague enough that it could–

Ken Klippenstein: [?] may be it I mean it could be anything. 

Jane Coaston: Yes, exactly. It could encompass a lot of people, like is Andrew Tate, like–

Ken Klippenstein: Right. 

Jane Coaston: He has some pretty anti traditional values views, but now that he’s declared many of these common views as a potential pretext to terrorism, what’s next? 

Ken Klippenstein: Yeah. So the point I really want to stress here is that there is a continuum. There’s a range of ways that this can play out. And I think part of the reason media doesn’t pay this much mind is because um they’re not wrong to say that Trump says a lot of things that don’t that don’t happen and that he’s somebody who’s, you know, impulsive. And and if you just went off his rhetoric, you wouldn’t have reporting that reflected what policy was. Those joint terrorism task forces making terrorism cases against individuals, that would be at the extreme end. But um towards the other end, we are already seeing the consequences of this. So I did a story recently on how um nonprofit groups are being advised by these major law firms in Washington to adopt different language so that you don’t run afoul of these things I described before that Treasury is looking for to try to strip them of their tax status, or worse, pursue criminal investigations as the memorandum makes clear. So there’s already a chilling effect on speech. And so I think we’re gonna find out how far um they’re gonna go because it’s not just that, they could start auditing taxes of companies. When they have a predicate for an investigation, they don’t only have to turn up terrorism. If they bump into other things through the course of an investigation, like maybe you filed your taxes wrong. Just imagine anything that some vindictive prosecutor could find. Any one of these things could be brought up, and this administration has evinced no reason to think that they’re not gonna take full advantage and pursue these tiny vindictive things that might not even work. So that’s it’s the middle of that continuum that I want people to think about and not just throw it out because oh, well, he says stuff and it doesn’t happen. Yes, that’s true. But again, there’s all kinds of ways that this can play out. 

Jane Coaston: Ken, as always, thank you so much for joining me. 

Ken Klippenstein: My pleasure and thank you for giving me a chance to talk about this. It’s such an important issue. 

Jane Coaston: It absolutely is. That was my conversation with independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. We’ll link to his sub stack in our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of CNN’s Caitlin Collins] The President said here, Jake he said, I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first phase of our peace plan. That means that all of the hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their troops to an agreed-upon line as the first steps toward a strong, durable, and everlasting peace. 

Jane Coaston: That’s CNN’s Caitlin Collins reading Trump’s Truth Social post Wednesday, announcing that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the quote, “first phase of a peace plan to pause fighting and release hostages and prisoners.” The news broke shortly before the timing of our recording and remains a fluid story. Negotiators have been meeting in Egypt for days to hash out a Trump-backed peace plan that he hopes will ultimately result in a permanent end to the two-year war and bring about a sustainable peace in the region. The initial agreement was confirmed by Israeli officials and Hamas, as well as Qatar, which was mediating the talks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on social media, “with God’s help, we will bring them all home.” The war started in 2023 with Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, many of them civilians. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, devastated Gaza, and upended global politics. 

[clip of Pam Bondi] Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa. Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. 

Jane Coaston: And that’s Attorney General Pam Bondi kissing Trump’s bottom Wednesday at a roundtable meeting on Antifa. Antifa, for the uninitiated, is short for anti-fascists and is used to describe far-left-leaning militant groups the government is blaming for protests against immigration and customs enforcement in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere. The only problem is that um Antifa doesn’t really exist as a group. Despite Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem alleging during the meeting that the quote, “girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa had been arrested.” The founder of Antifa’s girlfriend really has that Canadian boyfriend you’ll never meet feel to it. On Wednesday, a press release appeared on the official White House website, quoting numerous anonymous Portlanders, like a man and a woman and a business owner. Believe it or not, they all want the same thing. For the National Guard to storm their city. I kind of support it 110% is an actual quote. Later in the afternoon, this bonkers roundtable began, which included a who’s who of Trump’s cabinet lackeys and conservative influencers. It opened with a statement by Trump that, quote, “paid anarchists” want to, quote, “destroy our country,” followed by bizarre, conspiracy-laden claims that anti-Trump protesters have signs made of expensive paper with quote, “beautiful wooden handles” that therefore must be printed in the basements of secretive organizations. You know, like how signs are. Trump last month signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Again, Antifa is not an organization, and there is no federal domestic terror statute. But besides that, no problems. Since then, he’s used its alleged existence as a pretense to send federal troops into liberal cities. Luckily, one reporter at the roundtable was asking the important questions. 

[clip of unnamed news reporter] Have have you given any more thought to possibly suspending Habeus Corpus to not only deal with these insurrectionists across the nation, but also to continue rapidly deporting illegal aliens? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Yeah, suspending who? 

[clip of unnamed news reporter] Habeus Corpus. 

Jane Coaston: Aw man, habeas corpus. I love that guy. The US government shutdown has stretched into its second week with no end in sight. The House is still closed for business, while the Senate spent Wednesday running its favorite drill, a series of failed votes on competing funding bills that solve exactly zero problems. Here’s House Speaker Mike Johnson distilling the situation into terms we can understand. 

[clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson] I’ve tried to make this as simple as possible and as digestible as possible. It seems complicated what’s happening in Washington right now. It actually is very simple. Don’t let the Democrats distract you and and try to convince you of things that are not true. 

Jane Coaston: Ooh, distractions. And almost as if on cue, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted this video on Twitter that is both distracting and true. 

[clip of Chuck Schumer] Donald Trump and the Republican Party are hellbent on taking health care away from 60 million people, closing community clinics, rural hospitals, nursing homes. All so they can keep giving tax breaks to their billionaire friends. It’s a disgrace. So Democrats have three words for this. No [bleep] way. 

Jane Coaston: And while you can almost feel his Gen Z staffer coaching old Chuck. Go off, king? There are technically no formal negotiations happening. But behind the scenes, clusters of lawmakers from both parties are quietly trying to find an off-ramp, which hinges on striking a deal for preserving healthcare subsidies. Two prominent Republicans, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley have broken from their party, saying something must be done to help Americans pay for the coming health insurance rate hikes. And here I was thinking the sentence, Marjorie Taylor Greene is right was an oxymoron. But until either side flinches, the fallout is getting real. Troops are about to miss paychecks, airport delays are stacking up, and federal programs across the country are grinding to a halt. All while Trump continues to threaten to mass fire federal workers and refuse back pay for the rest. What a cool guy we elected to lead the hottest country in the world. The price of gold soared above $4,000 per ounce for the first time this week and is continuing to push past that number. Some context for those of us who are not disgraced former New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and don’t have gold bars stashed away in the nooks and crannies of our homes. Investors have traditionally seen gold as a way to protect against rising inflation. ABC News’s chief economic correspondent Rebecca Jarvis says the rising cost of gold signals economic uncertainty in the US and around the world. 

[clip of Rebecca Jarvis] Gold has doubled in the last two years, reflecting the scale of unknowns that continue to hang over major economies, including ours. You have the government shutdown, inflation, the amount of debt that we’ve taken on with real no real solutions to pay it off, lower interest rates, and then that great political uncertainty. You can really think of gold like a financial security blanket for investors. 

Jane Coaston: Even before the shutdown, gold and other metals like silver had seen wide gains over the last year. Large debt loads that the US and other governments are accumulating have been raising concerns about the threat of pushing inflation higher. And political instability around the world, Trump’s tariff tirades, and threats against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell probably aren’t helping. And that’s the news. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the airline that wants to charge you to recline your seat, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how Canadian airline WestJet has redesigned its planes and will only have seats that recline in its premium area, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and I’m starting to think that the companies that fly planes don’t really want you to fly on their planes. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Allee, Gina Pollack, and Caitlin Plummer. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]