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WASHINGTON – Former Homeland Security Department officials from the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations say the Jan.6 siege on the U.S. Capitol exposed the shortcomings of an agency with inexperienced staff and misplaced focus on immigration instead of rising national threats. the past four years.
“They tend to be younger, with less experience. They don’t have the incidents under their belt to know the proper protocols. So many protocols were not followed” Jan. 6, said Elizabeth Neumann, who was deputy chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, until April.
Instead, as armed rioters passed the police and moved into the Capitol, armed agents from DHS, an agency expressly designed to prevent another terrorist incident like the September 11, 2001 attacks, stood at the inside a neighboring building while awaiting a deployment order which never came. There is also no indication that DHS shared intelligence with its state and local partners or with the United States Capitol Police before January 6 that indicated that the protests could turn into a riot.
DHS also did not designate the day of President Donald Trump’s Washington rally as a special national security event, as it now did with the week leading up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday. If this had been the case, on January 6, the Secret Service could have coordinated with the National Guard and DHS law enforcement, including the administration of transport security, customs and border protection. and immigration and customs enforcement.
But it was the four years of inadequate monitoring and communication of the growing threat from domestic right-wing extremists that ultimately led to DHS’s failure to prevent the events on Capitol Hill, former DHS officials said.
Almost 20 years after the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the United States is in what former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson called “the most tense homeland security environment since. September 11, “but the department’s main focus is on the struggle. immigration rather than violent extremists.
“DHS for the past four years has been used to hammer out the president’s aggressive border security, anti-immigration agenda, and nothing else has been a priority for the agency,” Johnson said , who served under the Obama administration.
As more senior and Senate-confirmed Homeland Security Secretaries like John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen have left the Trump administration and have been replaced by acting secretaries, senior lawyers and law enforcement officials. also been replaced by Trump followers with minimal experience. Most had one important qualification: loyalty to White House adviser Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hawk, Neumann said.
“To get Miller to pass his policies, he put people in positions that had no qualifications. While Stephen was only focusing on immigration, the department is doing something else. And the more critical parts of the department have been embarrassed, ”said Neumann, who endorsed Biden as president after leaving DHS last year.
The current acting secretary for the inauguration is Peter Gaynor, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who was appointed after the abrupt departure this month of acting secretary Chad Wolf. Wolf’s own appointment was ruled illegitimate by a federal judge because an interim secretary who preceded him lacked the power to appoint him.
The current Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for engaging with the private sector on threats to the homeland graduated from university in 2015.
Acting General Counsel Chad Mizelle, who has the power to give the green light or block any legal position emanating from the agency, graduated from law school in 2013.
Mizelle, a close ally of Miller, was appointed after another reshuffle in late 2019. His wife, Kathryn Mizelle, was recently nominated by Trump for a life appointment as a federal judge, although the American Bar Association has said to Senate leaders that it was. “Unqualified” because she had never tried a case after being admitted to practice law.
“The problem is endemic to the whole administration. There is a lack of experience in all areas. You might be the smartest kid in the world, but at some point, experience matters,” said a former senior official in the Trump administration.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The changing threat
As immigration gained the upper hand over Trump’s DHS, the threat from national groups like those who broke through the barriers on Capitol Hill increased, and the foreign threats that DHS was created to protect itself in the aftermath of 9/11. were eclipsed, the former officials told me.
“DHS, along with FBI, local and state partners, will need to investigate the groups behind what happened more seriously [on Jan. 6] and what else they can plan for. This threat has been bubbling up for years now. … It is now a greater threat than jihadism, ”said former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who served during the administration of George W. Bush.
The emergence of new threats from domestic extremists was not fully appreciated even before Trump took office. In 2009, DHS analyst Darryl Johnson was criticized by Congress when it released a report on right-wing extremists.
Former Trump administration DHS employees have claimed intelligence on right-wing groups was suppressed to advance Trump’s political agenda.
In September, Brian Murphy, former head of the intelligence arm of DHS, alleged in a whistleblower complaint that political appointees at the agency ordered him to downplay the threat of Russian interference and change the section of the report. on white supremacy “in a way that made the threat seem less severe, as well as information on the prominence of violent” left “groups.”
A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on allegations that agency staff were inexperienced and too focused on immigration at the expense of domestic extremism.
Restore confidence
Biden is likely to restore parts of the Obama administration’s approach to domestic terrorism, including grants that fund research into white supremacist groups, a person familiar with the planning of the new administration has said.
But the most difficult turnaround will be rebuilding trust with the public and with state and local law enforcement officials, said a former federal law enforcement official. Many are wary, the official said, of the agency’s aggressive tactics in situations such as this summer’s protests in Portland, Ore., In which the Customs and Border Patrol have encountered threats. people trying to get past the Federal Courthouse.
“Some people see DHS as just being a law enforcement branch of the current administration’s political offices, or they think it does nothing at all,” the former official said.
DHS is a grouping of agencies from various departments concocted in the aftermath of September 11. But Chertoff argued that this is not due to its overall structure; he said they were caused by leadership failures under the Trump administration.
Now, he said, “the task is to restore confidence after four years of Trump.”
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