Whistleblower: Intelligence is being distorted

A new whistleblower paints “a disturbing picture” of the Department of Homeland Security, said Alex Ward in Vox.com. Brian Murphy, who until recently headed intelligence and analysis at DHS, has made “eye-popping charges” that he was repeatedly ordered by his superiors to doctor intelligence in order to fit President Trump’s political whims. Murphy states, for example, that in 2018 former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen ordered him to vastly inflate “the number of suspected terrorists crossing the southern border” so she could more easily lobby lawmakers for border-wall funding. He says that current acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf recently ordered him to suppress intelligence on Russia’s ongoing interference in the 2020 presidential election and, instead, focus on Iran and China. In July, Murphy says, he was told to bury evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign about Democratic nominee Joe Biden because it “made the president look bad.”

Democrats and the media predictably seized on Murphy’s allegations as a political bombshell— but omitted some crucial context, said Tobias Hoonhout in NationalReview.com. Just days before Murphy became a hero, he was being investigated by Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence

Committee for compiling intelligence dossiers on two American journalists and surveilling Portland protesters’ communications—acts that got him demoted on July 31. Schiff (D-Calif.) had called Murphy’s conduct “deeply troubling” and accused him of lying to Congress. Once Murphy turned on the administration, however, previous concerns about his lying were “conspicuously ignored.”

Murphy is hardly alone, said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post. This administration has repeatedly pressured several agencies to distort reality to serve the president’s “personal and political ends.” Attorney General William Barr is now racing to issue “an interim report” on his blatantly partisan effort to discredit the investigation into 2016 Russian election interference. Another cover-up is underway, said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe. An unpublished DHS study calls white supremacists the nation’s most “persistent and lethal” terrorism threat. But Murphy says Wolf a ordered him to downplay any reference to white supremacists and focus on left-wing groups, so as to buttress the Trump agenda of churning up white fear. In this administration, “appeasing Trump will always take precedence over addressing threats to democracy and national security.”