DHS whistleblower’s charges could be worse than we
thought
Opinion by
Columnist
September 15, 2020 at 3:38 p.m. CDT
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?
As
Hennessey and Schulz document, many of Trump’s top officials and campaign
propagandists have been relentlessly repeating the line that China, not Russia,
poses the greatest threat to our election. And some of them have also claimed
that China wants Joe Biden to win and Trump to lose.
Indeed,
the most devoted pro-Trump propagandist of all — Trump himself — has repeatedly said this.
And the
second-most devoted pro-Trump propagandist of all — Donald Trump Jr. — also
made the same claim at the GOP convention, asserting that “the intelligence
community recently assessed that the Chinese Communist Party favors
Biden," because “Beijing Biden” is “weak on China.”
That’s
comical, given that Trump’s trade wars with China are an utter disaster, and he
spent weeks bolstering China’s insistence that it had the coronavirus under
control, to push the lie that we didn’t need to worry about it here.
But put
that aside for now. The question, as Hennessey and Schulz note, is whether this
pressure on the DHS whistleblower to report on interference by China and Iran
rather than by Russia was deliberately done “to benefit the president’s
political interests and harm the president’s political opponent.”
In this
telling, the abuse would be far worse than we originally thought.
As you
may recall, a recent assessment from the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence said that Russia had undertaken a “range of
measures” to interfere in our election, primarily by denigrating Biden. But it
also noted that China and Iran were hostile toward Trump.
Yet
that assessment didn’t say China was taking any active steps
to interfere. It only noted that China had a preference for Trump to lose. Only
Russia is taking active measures, the assessment said. Yet for some reason
China was also included.
This angered Democrats, who charged that this
appeared designed to false-equivalence away the seriousness of Russian
interference, as Trump wants. Indeed, U.S. officials also privately suggested as much.
(Meanwhile, his attorney general, William P. Barr, may soon release an
interim report on the Russia investigation designed to undercut findings about
Russian interference last time.)
That
would be bad enough on its own. But the question now is whether this directive
was really about helping to create an entirely distinct foundation for another
one of Trump’s campaign narratives: Trump is so tough on China that it is
trying to interfere in our election in hopes that “Beijing Biden” will win.
As
Hennessey and Schulz suggest, this would mean “intelligence authorities and
positions of public trust might have been used to engineer the
narrative from the outset.”
If so,
this would be absolutely in keeping with many other abuses we’ve seen, such as Barr
constantly inventing narratives about the fraudulence of vote-by-mail to
provide cover for Trump to try to invalidate countless ballots against him, or
Trump’s GOP Senate allies running a fake investigation to validate a largely invented narrative about
Biden’s son Hunter.
And it
would be yet another example of the way in which we keep thinking we’ve
penetrated through to the very worst of the corruption here, only to see
another layer peeled back to reveal still more.
