Transcript of Trump Secret Watchlist for American Citizens Exposed by Ken Klippenstein

I want to highlight the powerful reporting by someone named ken Klippenstein on NSPM7. Have you heard of this National Security Presidential Memorandum 7? It was announced in the Oval Office and it was misreported elsewhere as just being one of Donald Trump's crazy executive orders that he talks about. But this is something far more serious and Ken Klippenstein really drilled into it when we talk about NSPM 7, this national security Memorandum. I also want to talk about this office space in Northern Virginia, affluent suburb just seven miles away from the CIA headquarters where there is a threat screening center in order to screen purported threats arising out of this NSPM 7 of people who the Trump regime could consider having views that are anti American, anti capitalism, anti Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender ever. That means hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion and and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality. And right now where we see this Trump regime labeling anybody who shows up at the no Kings protest as antifa, essentially they'd be saying I believe that any American who shows up and peacefully protests what they're doing.

Anyone who dissents could fit potentially one of these categories. Let me drill into this reporting from ken Klippenstein. Trump's NSPM 7 labels Common beliefs as terrorism indicators. New directives target anti Christian, anti American and anti capitalism opinions. So with the mainstream media distracted on everything else, Trump has signed this little notice national Security directive identifying anti Christian and anti American views as indicators of radical left violence. Called the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. It's being referred to as NSPM 7 by administration insiders. This is the first time in American history that there is an all of government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism is what Trump's Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance. To the extent that the majority, the major media noticed the directive at all, they even C SPAN incorrectly labeled it an executive order. Ken Klippenstein writes, like this week's designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. And as Ken Klippenstein writes, it's hard to overstate how much different NSPM7 is from the over 200 executive orders that Trump frantically signed since coming back into office. An executive order publicly lays out the course of day to day federal government operations, whereas a national security directive is a sweeping policy decree for the defense, foreign policy, intelligence and law enforcement apparatus.

Lippenstein writes national security directives are often secret, but in this case, the Trump administration chose to publish NSPM 7, only the seventh since coming into office. Now, you may also have seen Stephen Miller's appearance where he talked about Donald Trump having plenary authority to just do whatever the hell he wants. Here's what Miller said recently. Let's play it. And had this moment where it seemed like, I guess according to CNN and him, there was a technical difficulty. But I'll let you be the judge of it. Here, play this clip.

You have called. You've called the district judge's ruling blocking the deployment of National Guard in Oregon legal insurrection. Does the administration still plan to abide by that ruling?

Well, the administration filed an appeal this.

Morning with the 9th Circuit.

I would note the administration won an identical case in the 9th Circuit just a few months ago with respect to.

The federalizing of the California national guard.

Under Title 10 of the US Code, the President has plenary authority, has.

Stephen? Stephen? Hey, Stephen, can you hear me? It seemed.

Stephen, I apologize.

It seems like we're having a technical issue. We'll try to fix that and get back to you.

Now, as I said, Ken Klippenstein also wrote about the secretive watch list center that's executing nspm. You see this center right here? And they're the ones who are expanding this watch list, according to the FBI director. I want to bring in ken Klippenstein of Ken Klippenstein.com as well on Substack. He's been breaking a lot of major stories. A lot of whistleblower reports have been going Ken's way. And you, you know, I would say some of the biggest stories we've seen so far have come from Ken Krent. Ken, it's great to finally have you on the Midas Touch network. Thanks for your reporting. Talk to us. How big of a deal is this NSPM7 and why do you think it's gone under the radar except from reporting by you and some other independent media, but you leading the way.

It's a huge deal. Not just because of the language that you were just quoting directly from the memo saying that it considers as indicators of future terrorist acts anti Christian sentiment, anti government, anti traditional family. Some of these groups, I don't even know what they mean, anti gender. I mean, this is descriptors that would cover millions and millions of people in this country. And basically what that or what that is doing, again, it's not an executive order. It's a national security. Presidential memorandum is often classified. We're talking about NSPM7 NSPM6 we don't even know what it is because it's classified. There are very few of them. And the reason for that is because these are sweeping strategy statements that basically tasks the entire federal government to pursue a specific strategic goal over the remainder of the administration. And what this one did was it told basically federal law enforcement. All of those indicators that I was just describing, pay attention to those, make terrorism cases around those. And how this is going to be interpreted by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies across the country, country is that if you make cases around this articulated priority set around these indicators of terrorism, so called, you're going to get promoted, you're going to get more resources for these things.

And so this is a big picture, 10,000 foot view. Look at what the administration is prioritizing going forward. It is not the day to day of a lot of the executive orders that we've seen where they tend to focus more on small bore stuff, more on kind of ordinary daily government conduct. This is the strategy document telling them, hey guys, this is what we're going to be about for the next three years.

Right? So it's an instruction, not this broad policy position. And it is, you make this list of people, how big is, is it millions of people, is it thousands? But make a list of people who fit this criteria. That's what they're doing in an office. These people are showing up every day in a secretive office few miles outside of Langley, Virginia. And they are what they looking around at social media, are they looking at podcasts, are they looking at people giving speeches? Are they looking at people peacefully protesting? And they're creating a spreadsheet every day. This person, this person, this person, this person. And then that has impacts on those people's lives. And you know, what are we seeing in terms of, you know, like are law firms giving guidance? You know, is this, is, are banks having to respond like this is happening before our eyes even though it's not getting enough attention?

Yeah, this is really a one way mirror type situation where the federal government via, like you said before, the threat Screening center which handles the watch list, they have criteria and they have not just the list but the terms that they use to add people to the list. Your presence on the list isn't even known by the person. All of this is happening in secret so they can see what people are doing, but the public can't see what it is that they're doing. Now historically they focused on foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS groups for which you could at least make an argument that it makes sense to have this kind of an aggressive approach. But in the case of the Trump administration, they are convinced. And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this weekend, she said she thinks that Antifa poses the same kind of threat and is just as, quote, dangerous as those foreign terrorist organizations that I was just describing, despite the fact that it's not even clear it exists as an organized entity. And that's not my judgment. That is the judgment of Trump's first choice for FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom he appointed in 2017.

So they are bringing this huge counterterrorism apparatus, this post 911 monolith, and dropping the hammer on this group, which it isn't clear that exists. And it is not just Trump, it is his administration officials as well. He has the senior director for counterterrorism is Sebastian Gorka, who's also constantly saying things along these lines. You just quoted Stephen Miller. They're not particularly quiet about any of this. I think that part of the reason that it hasn't gotten the attention that it deserves is because it just sounds so crazy that I think people think that either you're being hyperbolic, even though all of this is quoted directly from that memorandum, you know, I'm not editorializing here. This is all in government records that you can go online and find. I think that is part of the reason that it hasn't got the attention. Another part is so much of it's happening in secret. The watch listing authority that we described not being one that goes out and says, hey, here's where we're looking at. But you get clues. FBI Director Cash Patel, in testimony to Congress several weeks ago, said that there is a 300 increase in domestic terrorism cases.

That is a huge increase. And so what, what it is that constitutes that we don't know because he hasn't said Senator Alyssa Slotkin of the she's on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. She had some good questions about this, where she asked the Trump administration nominee for Pentagon senior counsel. She said, hey, this list that you have, not just for foreign terrorist organizations, but domestic groups, too, this is all happening in secret. Are you going to tell us about it? He basically didn't answer. But we are just getting one sign after another that this is happening. It's not just the memorandum. It's not just something Trump said. You mentioned another example of something that's already happened, which is that major law firms, respected law firms in Washington, are instructing their clients to start comporting themselves to Start speaking differently so that you don't run afoul of this memorandum and have your tax status attacked. Have the Treasury Department look at your cash flows as it's actively doing right now in response to this memorandum. It tells the Treasury Department, go and look at organizations that might be supporting groups engaged in that list of indicators that I described earlier.

And as a result of that, these are not just, you know, hard left groups. These are, according to these legal advice that I'm describing, these organizations giving to mainstream group, mainstream liberal and democratic organizations. Tell them, hey, you guys have got to make sure that you don't run afoul of this. That's going to have a chilling effect on speech. And that's something that we're already seeing happening. In addition to that, just one day after the memorandum was issued, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a directive creating a anti ice crimes task force to protect ice. And throughout that directive she cites NSPM 7. So there's. Those are just two examples of what we have seen already in terms of material effects this order. The question is how much farther it's going to go and to what extent it's going to activate what are called Joint Terrorism Task Forces, mostly established after 9, 11, exist in all 50 states, represent thousands of federal agents. To what extent is this going to operationalize those folks to go after the indicators that I was describing before? Because unlike the National Guard deployments, the military is constrained by what's called posse comitatus.

So they're really limited in terms of what they can do. That's why you see these ridiculous videos of them just wandering around picking up trash because they're really limited what their authority is. But these Joint Terrorism Task forces, they do not have those limitations on them and they can do and go places that the military can't. And so I would say that's the next big question is to what extent is this memorandum going to task those Joint Terrorism Task Forces with going and doing and investigating. The list of indicators I was describing.

Before you mentioned Senator Slotkin, her questioning was, as you point out in your article, is particularly pertinent because she used to be a CIA analyst so she knows what counterterrorism initiatives look like with terrorists and the types of things that can be done, I think including surveillance and you know, and again triggering audits of financials and things to that would normally be deployed against cells. Okay, to cells. So now that whole panoply of power there, you know, is now look at these individuals on this list, these people and again from all the language we've seen from Mike Johnson, from Trump, as they talk about the no Kings protests, the language that they've been using over and over again is that this is the pro antifa, pro Hamas event. So their view of antifa is anybody, it seems, who dissents from what they're doing, they lump into one of these categories which they're now according to, you know, if they're treated again, it's all. A lot of this is still done in secretive. But if what they're doing is the same as how they've approached Al Qaeda, any American can be on this list and have the same treatment as though they were like an Al Qaeda suspect at this point.

That's. It should be the top story right now, you know, out there, I mean, amongst kind of many others. I. Let me just let me pivot there though. You could still comment on that because with a lot of your reporting in this moment, you know, I'm just curious, one independent reporter to another kind of independent reporter kind of navigating with big stories like this where people may go, hey, can you be in hyperbolic? You know, why are you causing all, why are you going there? And it's like I'm literally just saying what is happening, you know, And I'm sure you have that moment a lot as an independent reporter.

Well, Trump says so many crazy things that don't materialize that I'm sympathetic to the view that, oh, you know, you can't just go off of something that Trump is saying. But again, this is not just something that Trump is saying. You mentioned the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who compared the upcoming no Kings protests this weekend to, I think he said, pro Hamas and, you know, terrorist groups. So this is something that is solidly within the mainstream of the political leadership of the party. In addition to that, the second highest ranking Republican official in the House, Steve Scalise, called it something like the American hating protest. And then third, third top official in the House also compared it to terrorism. So this is something that's being echoed throughout the administration when Trump says stuff that is something that you can just chalk up to, you know, Trump's flamboyant rhetoric. That is often something that you'll see, he says, and it's not really reiterated by other principal figures within, in the case of national security, within the national security apparatus, you know, his appointees and certainly Congress. But that's not the case here. They're all talking like that.

To give you just one other example, Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Noem said recently that they had arrested the girlfriend of the leader of Antifa. And again, the judgment of the intelligence community and Trump's own FBI director as recently as a couple of years ago was that there was no such organized group. It's an idea. It's like saying the Internet hacking collective Anonymous has a leader. It doesn't work that way, you know, so there's a lot of. I think there's an abundance of indications here that this is something that the Republican Party in large part is taking seriously. And then when you look at federal law enforcement, like Pam Bondi, the attorney general, who's the country's top cop, operationalizing this and creating an ICE protection task force, again, you can go online and see that directive. It's publicly available. And she cites as its inspiration NSPM7 as its authority that it's based on. As NSPM7, you see that they are acting on this. This is not just words and it's not just Trump.

Want to tell everybody to go check out Ken Clippenstein.com that's your substack. It's where you publish a lot of this information. And it's not just on NSPM 7. I mean, you've been getting lots of whistleblower scoops that you've been. That you've been breaking love to have you back on to discuss those in the future. Ken, thanks for your work.

Thanks so much for having me.

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