DHS whistleblower's charges could be worse than we thought [View all]

[Zorro]

Opinion by Greg Sargent

As you know, a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security recently made a series of startling allegations: He claimed, among other things, that top DHS officials brought intense pressure on him to help hype the threat of organized leftist violence to try to bolster one of President Trump’s favorite reelection narratives.

This is only one of many ways in which top officials have placed their official duties and the levers of government at the disposal of Trump’s reelection needs. This blog compiled a list of examples along these lines earlier this week.

But there’s another buried layer in the whistleblower complaint that may constitute yet another way in which this is happening.

The whistleblower, a senior official named Brian Murphy, also alleges that he was ordered by acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”

Murphy claims Wolf said that directive originated from White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien.

At first, this seemed as if it might have just been another way in which top Trump officials were trying to obscure the importance of Russian interference in the election, in keeping with Trump’s longtime efforts to make that interference disappear.

But over at the Lawfare blog, Susan Hennessey and Jacob Schulz suggest that this might be more serious than it first appears: What if it constitutes an effort to cook the intelligence to literally create from scratch a largely fabricated narrative in its own right that Trump could campaign on?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/15/dhs-whistleblowers-charges-could-be-worse-than-we-thought/