A leaked memo by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Justice Department and FBI to compile a list of groups that may be labeled “domestic terrorism” organizations based on political views related to immigration, gender and U.S. policy.
The memo was obtained by independent investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, who joins us to discuss how it expands on President Donald Trump’s NSPM-7 directive following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which ordered a national strategy to investigate and disrupt groups the administration claims could incite political violence.
Bondi’s effort targets “not just the left,” but “anyone who isn’t a Trump supporter,” says Klippenstein of the sweeping order, which identifies targets as entities expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” support for “mass migration and open borders,” “radical gender ideology,” or views described as anti-American, anti-capitalist or anti-Christian, as well as “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”
People who report extremists may be financially rewarded, and the FBI is reviewing records from the past five years, as well as the present.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered the FBI to compile a list of what the Justice Department is calling “domestic terrorist” organizations. Last week, Bondi sent a memo to all federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies targeting a wide range of people, including those who hold what she calls, quote, “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-Christianity,” unquote. The memo also targets people who show, quote, “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,” unquote.
The investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein published a copy of Bondi’s memo on his Substack page on Saturday. Klippenstein notes Bondi’s language echoes a National Security Presidential Memorandum issued by President Trump, known as NSPM-7, to target nonprofits and activists. Trump signed the directive in September in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Ken Klippenstein, thanks so much for being with us from Madison, Wisconsin. Why don’t you tell us how you got a hold of this memo?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Well, it was provided to me by somebody who — I can’t really say much more than — had access to it. And what it was was an implementation order for that NSPM-7 directive from President Trump, which essentially targets anyone who isn’t MAGA. At first, I looked at it and thought, “Oh, this is targeting the left.” But then you see these so-called indicators of terrorism, things like anti-Christian sentiment, anti-American sentiment, and I realized that’s not just the left. That’s anyone who isn’t a Trump supporter.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain the significance of this, Ken Klippenstein.
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: It essentially takes NSPM-7, which advances the view that the major threat of terrorism is coming from these anti-Trump sentiments, and it puts it into effect. It uses tools available to the federal government, and federal law enforcement in particular. For example, it directs the FBI to go through its past half-decade or so of intelligence on antifa and on some of these other groups that I’ve been talking about, and tells them to make criminal cases around those and to circulate intelligence about it.
And part of that intelligence production effort involves soliciting tips from the public, getting people to narc on their fellow citizens who are evincing this anti-Trump sentiment. So, in one case, it tells the FBI to upgrade and kind of supercharge its tip system so that they can get this flow of information coming in from informants all over the country reporting on threats like these.
AMY GOODMAN: [inaudible] do you believe?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: I’m sorry. Could you repeat that again? It cut out for just a second.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is the architect of this memo, do you believe, of the NSPM-7?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: I would say it’s not a person so much as an incident, which was the murder of Charlie Kirk. As national security officials described to me shortly after the murder, the very next day there was a war room convened by the White House. And I think kind of unofficially taking point on this was President Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, and he kind of orchestrated, along with all these other national security appointees: How are we going to respond to this? And the decision was made that we would make anti-Trump tantamount to this terrorist threat, and we were going to prosecute it as such. So, I guess I would say, if I was to point to one single person, I would say Stephen Miller.
But this is really an attitude held by a lot of people in the administration, which I think is genuine fear in the wake of that shooting that something like that might happen to them, and so we have to create a response. And what that is is, essentially, the same sort of response to 9/11, but in this case it’s in — it’s directed at Americans, who the —
AMY GOODMAN: Ken, is money involved with this?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely. So, it directs the Treasury Department to audit taxes and try to find — the administration seems convinced that there’s some shadowy foreign group or financiers for a lot of the sentiments I was describing before, and antifa in particular. And so, it authorizes them to go through nonprofits’ taxes and to try to find evidence of something which there’s no public evidence exists in any sort of significant way.
AMY GOODMAN: But is there a reward being offered, like if someone calls an FBI tip line?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s another thing that this implementation order directs. It provides for a funding system to reward people that provide these tips that I was describing before. It’s basically a bounty system for anti-Trump thought and reporting on it.
AMY GOODMAN: And it goes back retroactively five years?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, the FBI right now, pursuant to this order, is digging through all of its intelligence to find whatever they can, going back to the Biden administration, that can be used to help make these cases.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the memo targets organizations, not only, what, formal NGOs, but also book clubs, community mutual networks, mutual aid networks, online forums?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it uses the phrase “organizations and entities,” which can mean individuals. So, again, it can’t be overstated how sweeping a directive like this is. This isn’t targeted. And to the extent that it’s being reported as directed at antifa, I think it’s important to remember, you know, antifa may not exist as such, but it includes a lot more than that. It also describes people opposed to immigration enforcement, which, if you look at polling, is like — you know, the way in which immigration enforcement has been rolled out under this administration, that could describe half the country or more of it. So, this is really much bigger than just antifa. And to the extent that antifa means anything, the administration defines it in its own way, which is different than how a lot of people would define antifa. So, it’s really important to understand that.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we just did a segment on the Pentagon bombing boats without evidence of them being, as the Trump administration calls them, narcoterrorists. They’re talking about foreign terrorists, so-called. So, here you’re talking about a domestic terrorist network. Are we talking about no trial, no — paid-for accusations? How does this work?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, I mean, the business of counterterrorism is a very ugly business. It is essentially precrime, in the sense that you are authorized to go and make investigations without the usual predicate that you would need of someone having committed a crime or finding evidence that suggests someone committed a crime. In counterterrorism, the theory behind it is that the threat is so great that we need to suspend those ordinary evidentiary standards for premising an investigation, and instead, all you need are these so-called indicators. And the Trump administration is defining those indicators as a lot of these groups we’ve just been describing, which can apply to millions and millions of Americans. These are very mainstream views, opposition to immigration enforcement and the way in which it’s been carried out this year.
So, the dragnet has gotten far wider. I mean, after 9/11, these tools were pointed at groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and, unfortunately, to some extent, just American Muslims caught up in this dragnet. But they’ve widened this to include far larger sets of people. And so, what we’re really seeing is the global war on terror coming home and becoming a domestic war on terror.
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Klippenstein, I want to thank you for being with us, investigative reporter. We’ll link to your latest piece, ”FBI Making List of American 'Extremists,' Leaked Memo Reveals.”