Reporter Ken Klippenstein on Publishing Luigi Mangione Manifesto & Internal UnitedHealth PR Memos

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to look more at Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he walked to a shareholders conference in New York City on December 4th. Mangione remains in custody in Pennsylvania as he fights extradition to New York. He’s hired the prominent lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo to represent him. She is the former second-in-command at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. A defense fund for Luigi Mangione has already raised over $100,000, in the latest sign that he’s become a folk hero to some.

On Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders appeared on Meet the Press and talked about why there is so much anger directed at the health insurance industry.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: What you have seen rising up is people’s anger at a health insurance industry which denies people the healthcare that they desperately need, while they make billions and billions of dollars in profit. So, killing anybody, shooting somebody in the back who’s a father of two, is outrageous, and it’s unacceptable. Nobody — nobody — should applaud it. I know Senator Warren did not. But I think what we need to ask ourselves when we talk about healthcare is why we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people, why we have a life expectancy which is significantly lower than in other countries, why working-class people die five to 10 years shorter than the people on top.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by the investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein. He’s broken several stories on the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. He was the first to publish Luigi Mangione’s full manifesto. He also obtained leaked internal documents detailing a UnitedHealthcare PR campaign in response to the shooting.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Ken. When we say that you were the first to publish the manifesto, you weren’t the first to get your hands on the manifesto. In fact, most media had their hands on it. Explain how you made that decision to publish it, when they were withholding it.

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: That’s exactly right. The news media — major media outlets, from The New York Times to the Post, CNN, ABC, all had their hands on this document, were sitting on it, sharing it with themselves socially — which I know from my friends at these various outlets — but refused to provide it to the general public. And so, when I obtained the document and read through it, I didn’t see any reason not to publish it, and so I went ahead and did that in response to what I saw as media paternalism at its worst — the judgment that this is safe for us to read, but it’s not OK for the public to read.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ken, in that manifesto, what do you think were some key portions that were most newsworthy, that the public deserved to know about?

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: The overwhelming focus on the healthcare system as an institution. That’s not, of course, to say that it’s OK to kill somebody — I think that goes almost without saying — to advance those goals, but to see in this the fact that it wasn’t just a completely random act of violence, as in fact the major media repeatedly asserted it was, if you look at — there was one particularly egregious case by CNN in how they were trying to paraphrase the contents of the document, again, without providing the underlying document to the public to come to their own conclusions, saying that in this are the rantings and ravings of a crazy person. When you read through that document, which wasn’t that long, but it’s very clear from it that this individual was motivated by grievances about the healthcare system. And so, that’s why it’s important to get that out to the public.

I think that if you ask these major media outlets why they didn’t do that, the explanations fall along roughly two lines. One is that it’s not safe for the public to have this. It might inspire copycat killings. I think that’s similar to saying, you know, violent video games are going to cause children to shoot up schools. I’m very skeptical of that. But in addition to that, what I found in the course of my reporting on that document was that there were deals that were struck with law enforcement, which furnished this document to various media outlets, in which they were essentially blackmailed into not releasing these records because they didn’t want to alienate the sources that they depended on for not just this document, but other exclusives.

AMY GOODMAN: You also looked at how UnitedHealthcare responded to the dam breaking on the immense anger directed at the healthcare industry after the killing of Brian Thompson. You’ve said the media is largely tone-deaf. If you can go over the second information that you received, which was the internal documents of UnitedHealthcare responding to this assassination and to the anger, in particular, at the healthcare industry that it unleashed?

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah. Over the course of reporting on this story, I’ve interviewed probably a dozen UnitedHealthcare employees, who themselves were shocked and horrified at how out of touch not just the public-facing response, but the internal messaging to employees about this was. Something I didn’t realize was the extent to which people working in these call centers, right up to management, not just, you know, low-level grunts, themselves are upset about having to deny claims and the way in which the industry conducts itself. And they felt as though — this was something I heard repeatedly in my interviews with them — to not acknowledge that is at least a part of this story is to overlook and to misunderstand what this is all about. And so, they’re getting their own internal messaging saying, you know, everything is fine.

Much of this changed around Thursday or Friday when The New York Times chose to publish an op-ed by the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, a CEO by the name of Andrew Witty. And it was only at that point, just a few days ago, that the tone sort of shifted towards “I feel your pain. I understand that healthcare is far from perfect.” But prior to that, there was very little in the way of recognition and acknowledgment of the public’s anger, not just on the part of UnitedHealthcare, but on the part of the news media, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And let’s talk a little about how — the other aspects that the corporate media has missed in this story. You delved into the legal problems facing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson before he was killed. Talk about the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund and the lawsuit that they had going.

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah. So, in May, the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund filed a lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare, the deceased UnitedHealthcare CEO, alleging that he had engaged in insider trading and fraud, in relation to a Justice Department investigation that was recently launched into the company, where anti-competitive — allegedly anti-competitive practices, which the then-CEO Brian Thompson was aware of, had knowledge of, and did not disclose to either the public or investors, and ended up selling, I think, over $10 million of his own private, personally held stock in the company before disclosing that to the public, which has the effect of benefiting him but hurting the rest of the shareholders, which aren’t just, you know, rich investors. It’s also pension funds and retirement funds, who don’t have the benefit of that knowledge to make decisions on.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Ken Klippenstein, if you can talk about all that has happened since the killing of Brian Thompson, the response with “wanted” online posters of other CEOs in New York, those posters appearing, and your response to what that means? And then, in the corporate media, while they’ve been forced, because there’s such a tremendous backlash against the health insurance industry now, to address what’s happening, there is little discussion — and certainly UnitedHealthcare is not talking about it — of universal healthcare.

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: That’s exactly right. And I speculate that it is the absence of discourse around our healthcare system that fed into the rage we’re seeing now. I did a story during the election on the two conventions for their major nominees, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and noticed that between the two of them, in their convention speeches, they mentioned the word “healthcare” twice. So, for the first time in my adult life, going back to Obama, going back to the 2016 elections, where Senator Bernie Sanders put healthcare front and center at that election, and then, most recently, in 2020, when Biden even gave a nod to the public option, this is the first election in my adult memory that I can recall healthcare not being at the center of the debate.

And when you do something like that, it doesn’t surprise me that the public is angry, not just at the silence on the part of politicians, but the sense that things are not going to change. And to miss that as part of this story is just malpractice, because that is the backdrop against which this entire event took place and, I think, is informing a lot of the frustration and rage that people have, not necessarily at the CEO as an individual, but the CEO as a personification of the healthcare system that people feel this episode represents.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ken, you’ve also noted that within the healthcare industry, the employees, for instance, of UnitedHealth, have deep concerns, as well, about how the company is functioning in regards to the people it insures. Could you talk about that?

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, I’ve spoken to people who described hanging up with people trying to get claims filled, sobbing at, you know, the sense of sadness and empathy for the situation in which they are. And, you know, they’re just having to base their decisions off of a structured list of rules that are decided on high that they have no say in. And that was the biggest shock to me in reporting on this, was realizing how little daylight there is between many of the employees that I talked to and the general frustration you’re hearing from the rest of the public. If you read The New York Times and Washington Post, they’ll tell you — they’ve repeatedly run stories saying, “Oh, you know, employees are — feel as though they’re being treated unfairly by the public opinion. It’s not really health insurance companies’ fault. It’s, you know, maybe hospitals and doctors, that kind of thing.” Certainly, the dozen or so people that I have talked to, I’m able to identify very little in the way of disagreement that they have with some of the most angry sentiments we’re seeing expressed on the part of the general public.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ken, the MAGA right lionizing — this is going back in time — Kyle Rittenhouse, who, when he was 17, fatally shot two men and injured one with a semiautomatic rifle during racial justice protests in Kenosha, in Wisconsin, the state you’re in right now, in 2020, becomes a cause célèbre among U.S. conservatives during the trial, continues to be lionized by gun supporters, among others. Your response to those who say the left is doing the same with Mangione now and that no matter what the cause, the extrajudicial assassination of anyone is reprehensible, Ken?

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yes, of course it is. I think that practically — I hope that goes without saying.

As to the political dimensions to this, I would encourage people to just look at the manifesto, look at the wealth of social media posts that are available to us, to go through and read and get a sense of the alleged shooter’s political ideology. And I think what will become clear is that this is not a partisan issue, just as healthcare being a serious problem in this country is not a partisan issue. I think that comes through very clearly in both the manifesto that I published and in the public response, too. I mean, just, you know, even just — I mean, this is anecdotal, but even just on a personal level, the people that I’ve heard express frustration in the wake of this, they’re not saying, “Oh, you know, this is all Obama’s fault or Biden’s fault or Trump’s fault.” They are angry at the corporations, which, in the case of UnitedHealthcare, spend huge sums of money lobbying the federal government on both sides — and you can see this in their campaign — in their political contribution disclosures — lobbying both parties to keep the system that we have in place and to make sure that the problems we have are not ameliorated.

AMY GOODMAN: Ken Klippenstein, we want to thank you so much for being with us, investigative reporter who’s broken a number of stories on the UnitedHealthcare CEO killing — we’ll link to your recent articles posted at KenKlippenstein.com — speaking to us from Madison, Wisconsin.