Ken Klippenstein is the Trump administration’s “dissent channel.” 

The investigative reporter, now Washington correspondent for The Nation, has broken some of the biggest national security stories of the coronavirus era. Klippenstein revealed that Border Patrol had conducted an arrest in Portland as federal agents were streaming into the protest-roiled city and uncovered internal Pentagon documents about America’s lack of pandemic preparedness. 

He was even one of the first to report on the early outbreaks in immigration detention. 

Many of Klippenstein’s investigations have revealed how America’s long wars in the Middle East are coming home. U.S. military planners were worried that the economic pressure campaign against Iran was making the coronavirus pandemic more difficult, and Homeland Security officials tried to tie Antifa protesters to the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia. 

The National Interest spoke to Klippenstein about national security, the politicization of intelligence, and how the forever wars affect law enforcement in the United States. Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity. 

Matthew Petti: Thanks for giving your time. I wanted to dive right in with some news that just came out, which was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on election interference, where they said basically that Russia was rooting against Biden, and that Iran and China were rooting against [President Donald] Trump. 

You’re someone who has a lot of experience reporting on the national security apparatus and how stuff can get molded and manipulated, and I’m curious if you have any thoughts on the process that may have led to this report? 

Ken Klippenstein: I think, coming into an election like this—this is the first election since 2016 in which foreign influence was a big concern, so I think it’s natural that they would conduct an assessment now. 

This is what the ODNI and other national security agencies do. They’re tasked with detecting foreign influence, conducting what’s called counter-intelligence, which means trying to counter the intelligence apparatuses of foreign states. 

I think this has become increasingly politicized—so it’s probably unusually in the sense that it’s getting a lot of coverage—but this is what these agencies do, so I’m not too surprised that they would issue a statement like that. 

Matthew Petti: We did see, with the DHS report on YPG, that there is a tendency to try to link domestic issues to foreign conflicts and vice versa. I’m curious if you see anything concerning with the ODNI report, and also the attempts to ban TikTok—a use of domestic tools for foreign policy aims, or bringing foreign issues into domestic law enforcement. 

Ken Klippenstein: I think there’s been a general politicization, not just on the part of the Trump administration, which has been quite intense, but on the part of the Democrats as well. 

For example, if you asked a good national security reporter, they’d tell you [House Intelligence Committee chair Adam] Schiff and the Democrats in particular in the House, with the access to intelligence that they have, there’s going to be a tendency to release stuff that advances their political aims. 

That’s pretty typical, but it has intensified in recent years. 

After 2016, the framing of this election as one in which foreign influence made a significant or even decisive impact—I’m not commenting on that either way—the notion or perception that that happened in 2016, it just seems like a continuation of that. 

But, again, this is what these agencies do. 

It’s typical for them to look for foreign influence, and try to counter the intelligence apparatus of other states or foreign groups, but in this case, we’re seeing it potentially be a political thing. 

In the case of the Kurdish militant groups, this is consistent with what President Trump has said in the past, for example, when he vowed to label Antifa a terror group, that is of course very difficult to do for a domestic organization unless you’re able to prove that foreign sponsorship. 

I would say that what is different now is that this is being used for increasingly partisan ends, and I would say that this is true of both Republicans and Democrats, although I think the Trump administration has been more intense in exploiting these kinds of things. 

This is the direction that these things have been going. 

I don’t want to give the impression that this is unprecedented for them to be looking at these sorts of things, but for the parties to use them for reasons related to elections, and to say, “this guy’s preferred by that foreign country,” that’s pretty unusual, even if it’s not unusual for the intelligence agencies to be conducting these assessments. 

Matthew Petti: The flip side of that, which is very bizarre but also seems to be happening a lot, is that foreign policy ends up getting tied up in domestic partisan politics. 

I think a lot of what we’re doing with Iran and China is definitely tied to domestic Republican concerns and throwing red meat to the base. 

And I mean, [for Democrats], the whole Afghanistan withdrawal thing with the Russian [bounties on] troops. 

Even the Kurdish thing. The whole idea that the Kurds were supporting Antifa seems to me like it comes from when [Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan tried to harness a U.S. domestic concern to his advantage. 

He knows Trump’s opposed to Antifa, he knows there’s this tenuous link, so he tries to link the two. 

Ken Klippenstein: I think there was a report recently—I wish I had time to explore this in my article—showing that Erdoğan had spoken to Trump and had tried to make the case to him that there’s ties between these groups, I would imagine because he wants help in extirpating the Kurds and Kurdish groups. 

The context being, Turkey and Erdoğan’s horrible mistreatment of the Kurdish minority population, not just within its borders, but without as well. 

That is very significant, and to see a president potentially pursuing these sorts of policies, as it appears to be the case, because he heard it from some head of state that he chatted with— 

That’s certainly very unusual, and an intensification of political dynamics that may have been there in the past, but not in this sort of ferocity we’re seeing right now. 

Matthew Petti: The other strange thing about that is that it doesn’t seem like the Pentagon or the State Department latched onto this at all. 

To them, it’s the same strategy, it’s the same policy towards the Kurds. 

But then domestic law enforcement latched onto it, which may not have been Erdoğan’s aim to begin with. 

It’s interesting that America has such a big intelligence apparatus with so many different moving parts. 

Ken Klippenstein: One thing you pointed out is that this has been a law-enforcement response. So when we talk about the document I obtained, which was a Customs and Border Protection document, it is a law-enforcement agency, it’s not in the intelligence community. 

The Department of Homeland Security does have a unit that’s in the intelligence community, which is Intelligence and Analysis, but that’s separate from CBP. 

Law enforcement is able to do things that the intelligence community can’t do. Formal components of the intelligence community are restricted in the kinds of information that they’re able to gather about U.S. residents.

They need an authorization, for example, from the FISA court, a secret court that identifies people they consider to be foreign agents. Once they get that authorization, then they can look at individuals.

But the law-enforcement agencies don’t need that necessarily. Law-enforcement agencies can conduct forms of surveillance that the intelligence agencies would need to pass through more barriers to be able to do. 

This is something that had been told to me by a DHS intelligence friend of mine. He said law enforcement is the way that the administration could potentially crackdown on Antifa, which, as I’m being told, is the aim of a lot of these different programs we’re seen, from the Portland deployment to this DHS report. 

He said that the easiest way to go about doing that is actually not to use the intelligence community, because of those rules I was describing before. It’s to use the law-enforcement agencies like the Justice Department. 

For example, they sent U.S. Marshals down to Portland. And they were doing a lot more there than is publicly known. I’m writing about that now. 

Not just the U.S. Marshals, but potentially using the FBI as well, and of course DHS itself has a whole bunch of law enforcement components within it, so all of those tools can be useful if you’re not able to clear the bar and provide requisite evidence that folks are acting on behalf of a foreign power. 

As in the case of Antifa, I think they probably can’t. 

Matthew Petti: Sometimes you have very frank admissions behind closed doors. I remember you had a scoop a few months ago where the U.S. military was basically admitting that the U.S. pressure campaign on Iran was making the coronavirus situation worse, which is something that the State Department was super-adamant is not the case. 

Ken Klippenstein: Very often, I find that the rank and file of the agencies, and even the lower-level leadership, is if not in disagreement with the political appointees and the leadership, is sometimes even at swords’ points with them. 

These agencies are not monolithic. That’s where a lot of my leaks come from. 

Perhaps these leaks are not things that would flatter the administration, so the question becomes, "why did they leak it?" It’s because there’s different kinds of people in these agencies. 

I’m not saying that my sources are necessarily liberal Democrats—in fact, I would say most of the time they’re not—but they’re people who have a different conception of what the job is. 

And just to be straight, by and large, the rank and file—their concept of what their work is is whatever the mission of the agency was intended to be, as opposed to what the politicals and the White House say that it’s supposed to be. 

Because of that, you have an inherent tension for anyone in these intelligence or law-enforcement agencies. 

Politically, whatever White House is in power is going to have their own goals, and those may not and often don’t coincide what the FBI was designed to, or what the DHS was originally intended to do. 

When I have a story like that, I’m essentially a dissent channel for folks inside that are unhappy and feel compunctions about policies that are being pursued, because they don’t think they are either in the national interest or in the human interest, as is the case with our refusal to let Iran import more stuff so they can beat this coronavirus crisis.

Matthew Petti: You basically pre-empted a question I was going to ask you, which is—I’m sure you’re Public Enemy Number One at DHS, so why do people still talk to you? 

Ken Klippenstein: Frankly, people are not just pursuing what’s expedient. Folks also have moral sensibilities, and they feel bad about things. I don’t know how else to say it than that. 

People will often feel guilty about what they’re seeing, and one way that they can either mitigate these bad policies or in some cases even end them is by leaking. 

When I came into this job, I was thinking that all of these leaks would be bureaucratic sniping that the public incidentally benefits from, different people in the administration or agency trying to knife each other. 

It’s really not the case. In my experience, it’s been much more sincere, it’s people that want to help. 

Matthew Petti: Which, as an American, is a very heartening thing to hear.

I don’t want to speculate on who’s going to win the 2020 election, but there is a good chance that we end up with a different president in the White House, and they’re going to have a strong mandate from Democrats and a strong push from the Left to—if not get rid of—completely overhaul the post-9/11 security state. 

I’m curious if you got to sit down in the White House, got five minutes with the president, what your idea of how to fix the post-9/11 security state would be. 

Ken Klippenstein: Well, I can tell you what folks in DHS think it would be, at least with respect to DHS. 

A lot of them—it’s surprising to me when people say we need to dismantle DHS and it’s treated as a far-out utopian idea. There’s a lot of folks in DHS who feel that way as well! 

That’s not to say that they want to just get rid of their department or job, but many of these departments had existed prior to the creation of DHS, which is a post-9/11 agency, and many of them would prefer to go back to the previous state of affairs. 

For example, you have ICE, and when people think about ICE, they think about people breaking families up and deporting people.

That’s only part of ICE. That’s what is called the Enforcement and Removal Operations that does that.

There’s another large part of ICE, which is called Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI for short, and they primarily don’t do immigration stuff. They hate the fact that they have to do it, and they resent it. 

Not just the sort of abstract idea that they’re under the same umbrella as this section of the agency that’s doing those things, but they say that it makes their job harder. 

These guys are working on, say, child trafficking cases, or monitoring imports to say that unsafe things don’t come through. They say that it’s harder for them to do their jobs because of how politicized their jobs have been. 

If someone sees an ICE badge, an ordinary person, or a migrant or whoever it is is not going to know that HSI is not actually primarily the immigration portion. They’re going to see that and panic. So they say it’s making their job really hard to do. 

To the extent that they do immigration stuff, it’s that they’ve been tapped to do it instead of the work they had been doing previously, which they want to go back to doing. 

It’s quite interesting because there are segments of DHS that are not to the Left, that would be happy to go back. There were parts of it that were under Treasury, there were parts of it that were under the Justice Department. 

I wish this notion of dismantling ICE would be interrogated a little bit more, in terms of what that means exactly. Does that mean you make all these things disappear, or do you mean that you get rid of some of them, and move some of them to other agencies? 

There’s a whole continuum of different options that an incoming administration could have in terms of reforming an agency like this, which has become extraordinarily politicized, as we’re seeing, for example in the Portland deployment, where the DHS was willing to do what the military was not. 

Trump had tried to tap active-duty military to respond to the civil unrest, and General Milley ended up distancing himself from it. 

In an extraordinary column in the Atlantic, [former Defense Secretary] General Mattis ended up criticizing Trump, which whatever you think of Mattis, that is very unusual for a four-star general to come out publicly against the President. 

Any high-ranking military official like that, but particularly him, he has always avoided politics, at least in any partisan or overt discussion of politics. 

You really see DHS coming to fill this vacuum that [the Department of Defense] is refusing to do on behalf of Trump. And that really illustrates the problems with the agency and how easily it can be controlled by political groups in the White House. 

Again, there’s a whole range of options. It’s not like, “abolish it or don’t.” There’s a whole range of versions of DHS or configurations of the departments therein that we can pursue. 

Matthew Petti: It seems like we got to a really scary point in America where it opened up a lot of frightening possibilities for the future.

It is definitely to the credit of our system that the military looked at that and said, “we’re standing at the edge of an abyss,” and signaled, “we need to pull back.” 

It is, on the other hand, true, that a lot of the homeland security stuff is a product of our foreign wars. 

A lot of people fancy themselves warriors. A lot of people are learning counterinsurgency tactics. 

I’m curious if you think this idea of “ending the forever wars” and a more restrained foreign policy might have a more salutary effect on the way our law enforcement is run. 

Ken Klippenstein: Absolutely. Just look at local law enforcement and some of the problems we’ve run into. 

Why is Black Lives Matter and George Floyd happening? In part, it’s because we have Pentagon programs where we’re literally giving military equipment to local law enforcement. They lack the training to handle these things. 

Do we want their jobs to be the sort of special forces role we have in Afghanistan, or do we want them to be integrated into the community in a way where they don’t see the public as an enemy like that. 

These military programs, I don’t know how much good they do for the police in terms of making their jobs easier to do. It seems like, as was the case in Portland, these very heavy-handed approaches can often escalate the situation beyond what it would have been with a softer touch. 

Absolutely, our foreign policy comes back home. 

I can’t think of a more striking example of that than this attempt to tie Americans who fought alongside the Kurds in Syria to Antifa because that is the same approach that they have done in the past to target certain Muslims who have traveled abroad. 

This may have begun as a policy that only targeted certain groups and individuals, but as you can see now, it’s becoming a lot broader, and that’s the mission creep tendency that we see. 

Anyone in the intelligence community will tell you this. Agencies are not going to give up power once you give to them. They always want more. 

There has to be a president who will come in and recognize that “oh, irrespective of what the situation is, the generals or the homeland security is going to say, ‘we need more,’ because that’s what they do.”

It’s their job to think about what types of further authorities and resources are sensible, and if indeed they, and what is just this sort of institutional imperative, almost like a cell that reproduces and continues growing. 

Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter: @matthew_petti.

Image: Reuters