Steve Miller is the Key to Understanding Chad's Rise: At DHS, Chad Wolf is Playing a Political Game

[Zorro]

“STEPHEN MILLER IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING CHAD’S RISE”: AT DHS, CHAD WOLF IS PLAYING A POLITICAL GAME WITHIN A GAME

Wolf’s rise to the top of the Department of Homeland Security happened largely by chance. Now that he’s there, colleagues say he’s learned to play the Trumpworld game—and formed heavyweight alliances. “Stephen really tried to be the shadow secretary of Homeland Security,” says a former DHS official, “and his vessel for doing that was Chad.”

When Chad Wolf defended the Department of Homeland Security’s crackdown in Portland, Oregon this summer, his former colleagues were perplexed. To them, the man decrying the “violent anarchists” threatening “to burn down” a federal courthouse was almost unrecognizable. It wasn’t just the partisan nature of his comments, made before the Senate in August, but the aggression with which he delivered them. “That doesn’t match the guy I worked with,” a former senior DHS official told me. “It’s not his personality.” Wolf, like so many others before him, was plainly putting on a show for Donald Trump: “He’s playing to the audience of one.”

Wolf’s movements in the months since federal officers in unmarked vans hoovered up protesters in Portland have constituted an encore performance, featuring rhetoric that could’ve been cribbed from the president’s Twitter feed. As experts fret that the presidential election, less than two weeks away, might foment widespread violence regardless of the outcome, Wolf’s acquiescence to Trump has arguably become a homeland security threat in itself. “There’s a difference between advancing your political agenda and interfering in the ability of intelligence, law enforcement, and security agencies to protect the nation,” John Cohen, a former deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS, told me. “And that’s the difference here.”

Ask a half dozen people who have worked closely with Wolf to describe him—which I did—and the portrait that emerges is remarkably unremarkable. Sources I spoke with described Wolf as an effective but milquetoast bureaucrat who, before his elevation to the helm of DHS, kept his personal views so close to the vest that at times he didn’t appear to have any. “He’s a nice guy, but not a super-nice guy,” said one source who worked closely with Wolf. His stoicism often prompted colleagues to ask, “What’s Chad thinking?” said a second former senior DHS official. (After repeated requests from Vanity Fair, DHS did not make Wolf available for an interview.) As he fell further upward through the ranks at DHS, Wolf’s survival instinct led him to foster connections with those who would hone him into the tool he has become. “He is savvy in the sense that Chad knows who is important around the president and who he needs to not piss off. Namely, Stephen Miller,” the second former senior DHS official told me. “Stephen Miller is the key to understanding Chad’s rise in this administration and his ultimate nomination to be secretary of Homeland Security by the president.”

Wolf didn’t climb the institutional ladder so much as hang from a rung longer than most. After a four-month stint at the Transportation Security Administration in the beginning of the Trump administration, Wolf joined the DHS front office as deputy chief of staff and top aide to then deputy secretary Elaine Duke. He stuck by Duke when she was elevated to acting secretary as a result of John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen taking White House positions. When Nielsen returned to DHS and was confirmed as secretary, Wolf remained in the same role, serving as her chief of staff. After Kevin McAleenan took over from Nielsen, Wolf was confirmed as the undersecretary for strategy, policy, and plans.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/chad-wolf-acting-secretary-department-homeland-security