Ken Klippenstein, a reporter for The Intercept, said Thursday that much of the unprecedented security measures at President Biden’s inauguration were “theater,” comparing it to airport security measures.
“My understanding is a lot of it is …security theater of the sort that you see in airports,” Klippenstein said in a Hill.TV interview. “The notion that they’re going to be able to run these insider threat assessments for thousands of Guardsmen in the last few days is ludicrous.”
Asked about what security threats might remain an issue, Klippenstein said “part of the problem is, this huge military presence… that’s sort of a sledgehammer approach when what we might need is a scalpel.”
Klippenstein specifically faulted the Trump administration’s reduced emphasis on domestic extremism, saying he had spoken to an expert on such threats who had been told to focus instead on “students from overseas who had overstayed their visas, and he thought it was ludicrous that he’d undergone all this training and had all these clearances and accesses to just be doing stuff that any sort of local law enforcement could be handling.”
“It seems more to me that the resources… perhaps are there, it’s just that they’re being used on the wrong things,” Klippenstein added.
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