Trump loyalists interfered to downplay Russia election threat – whistleblower

Trump loyalists running the Department of Homeland Security manipulated intelligence reports to play down the threat of Russian election interference and white supremacists and exaggerate the threat of antifa and anarchist groups, according to the department’s former top intelligence official.

The official, Brian Murphy, said he was demoted in August from his position running the department’s office of intelligence and analysis because of his refusal to go along with the fabrication of intelligence to match Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and for making formal complaints about the political pressure. He filed a whistleblower reprisal complaint on Tuesday.

Murphy was transferred to a DHS management position after his team was found to have collected information on reporters and protesters in Portland, Oregon. In his complaint, he claims the office “never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr Murphy is aware or ever authorized”, and he described the reporting as “significantly flawed”.

He insists the real reason for his transfer was his refusal to manipulate vital intelligence on national security.

Murphy alleges that the efforts to falsify DHS intelligence date back to 2018, when the then homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, asked his office to inflate the numbers of known or suspected terrorists crossing the border with Mexico, in support of Trump’s demand for a border wall.

Murphy says the intelligence identified three such terrorist cases. In December 2018, Nielsen told the House judiciary committee there were 3,755.

According to Murphy’s testimony, Nielsen and her successor, Chad Wolf, continued to exaggerate the terrorist threat at the border in 2019, while being aware of the real figures.

Murphy’s most serious allegations concern the effort to downplay Russian meddling in the election while it was under way. In May this year, Murphy says, Wolf told him “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”.

Wolf told Murphy the orders came from the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.

“Mr Murphy informed Mr Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the whistleblower complaint says.

On 7 July, Murphy was told to stop circulating any information about Russian disinformation efforts until he met Wolf. The next day, according to the complaint, the acting homeland security secretary told Murphy the assessment of the Russian role “should be ‘held’ because it ‘made the president look bad’”.

When Murphy objected, he was excluded from meetings on the subject, and an alternative assessment was leaked to the press which put Russian interference on a par with China and Iran – an equivalence which Murphy, and most intelligence experts, say is not supported by the facts.

“This is a huge deal,” the former National Security Agency lawyer Susan Hennessey wrote on Twitter. “Is [national security adviser] O’Brien directing the [intelligence community] and others to lie about or distort the China election threat to hurt Biden and help Trump?”

Top administration officials, including the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe; the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; and the attorney general, William Barr, have claimed that China is as big a threat, if not a much greater danger, to the integrity of the US elections than Russia, with the implication that China favours Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. No substantial evidence has been presented to support that claim, which is contradicted by a vast amount of material, including reports by the special counsel Robert Mueller, and the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee, detailing Russian interference.

According to the whistleblower complaint, a homeland threat assessment (HTA) drawn up by Murphy’s intelligence analysts in March this year was also blocked by Wolf and other DHS political appointees because of its sections on Russian interference and the white supremacist threat.

Murphy was told by his superiors he “needed to specifically modify the section on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent ‘leftwing’ groups”. When he refused, the HTA was taken out of his hands.

“It is Mr Murphy’s assessment that the final version of the HTA will more closely resemble a policy document with references to antifa and ‘anarchist’ groups than an intelligence document,” his complaint says.

Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the executive editor of the Lawfare blog, urged some scepticism over Murphy’s claims in view of his office’s involvement in the monitoring of journalists in Portland.

“Murphy’s account is especially weak on key allegation that he was reassigned as retaliation for whistleblowing, as opposed to astonishingly bad judgment. It could be that, in an effort to tell a self-serving story, he is also revealing very serious (and real) wrongdoing at DHS,” she wrote.