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Trump loyalists who run the Department of Homeland Security manipulated intelligence reports to downplay the threat of Russian electoral interference and white supremacists and to exaggerate the threat from Antifa and anarchist groups, according to the former senior intelligence official for the department.
The official, Brian Murphy, said he was demoted from his position at the head of the department’s intelligence and analytics office in August, due to his refusal to accept intelligence fabrication to match Donald Trump’s rhetoric and for filing formal complaints about politics. Pressure. He filed a complaint of retaliation per whistleblower on Tuesday.
Murphy was transferred to a DHS administrative position after his team was found to have collected information on reporters and protesters in Portland, Oregon. In his complaint, he claimed that the office “never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr. Murphy is aware or ever authorized,” and described the information as “significantly flawed.”
He insisted that the real reason for his transfer was his refusal to manipulate vital intelligence on national security.
In the whistleblower complaint, Murphy alleges that efforts to falsify DHS intelligence date back to 2018, when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen asked her office to increase the number of known or suspected terrorists crossing the border into Mexico, in support of Trump’s demand. for a border wall.
Murphy said intelligence identified three of those terrorist cases. In December 2018, Nielsen told the House judicial committee that there were 3,755.
According to Murphy’s testimony, Nielsen and his successor, Chad Wolf, continued to exaggerate the terrorist threat at the border in 2019, although they were aware of the actual figures.
Murphy’s most serious accusations concern an effort to downplay Russian meddling in the election, when it was actually underway in the course of the campaign. In May of this year, Murphy said that Wolf told him “to stop providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States and instead begin reporting on the interference activities of China and Iran.”
Wolf told Murphy that the orders came from National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.
“Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf that he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the complainant’s complaint reads.
On July 7, Murphy was told to stop circulating any information about Russian disinformation efforts until he met Wolf. The following day, according to the complaint, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security told Murphy that the assessment of Russia’s role “should” be maintained “because it” made the president look bad. “
When Murphy objected, he was excluded from meetings on the issue, and an alternate assessment that put Russian interference on a par with China and Iran was leaked to the press, an equivalency that Murphy, and most intelligence experts They say it is not supported by the facts.
“This is a big problem,” said former National Security Agency attorney Susan Hennessey. wrote on Twitter. “It is [national security adviser] O’Brien directing the [intelligence community] and others who lie or distort China’s electoral threat to harm Biden and help Trump?
Senior administration officials, including the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the attorney general, William Barr, have asserted that China is such a great, if not much greater, threat to integrity. than Russia, with the implication that China favors Trump’s Democratic challenger Joe Biden. No substantial evidence has been presented to support that claim, which is contradicted by a large body of material, including reports by special counsel Robert Mueller and the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee, detailing Russian interference.
According to the whistleblower complaint, Wolf and other DHS political appointees also blocked a national threat assessment (HTA) produced by Murphy’s intelligence analysts in March this year due to its sections on Russian interference and the white supremacist threat.
His superiors told Murphy that he “needed to specifically modify the section on white supremacy in a way that would make the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent ‘left’ groups.” When he refused, they took the HT from his hands.
“It is Mr. Murphy’s assessment that the final version of the HTA will look more like a policy document with references to antifa and” anarchists “groups than an intelligence document,” said his complaint.
Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and executive editor of the Lawfare blog, urged some skepticism about Murphy’s claims in light of his office’s involvement in tracking journalists in Portland.
Murphy’s account is especially weak in the key accusation that he was reassigned in retaliation for reporting wrongdoing, rather than a shockingly bad trial. It could be that, in an effort to tell a selfish story, I am also revealing very serious (and real) wrongdoing at DHS. ” she wrote.
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