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A former senior Department of Homeland Security official who has previously accused the Trump administration of politicizing intelligence said Sunday that a return of President Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 “would be a disaster” for the US intelligence community .
“(Former President Trump) has disparaged the intelligence community, he spreads disinformation – and it’s an existential threat to democracy and he’s one of the best at spreading it and harming this country,” Brian Murphy, who once headed the DHS intelligence arm, said Sunday in an exclusive ABC interview on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos.
Murphy, a longtime federal law enforcement official, made headlines last year after filing a whistleblower complaint accusing Trump-appointed leaders of politicizing intelligence by withholding or downplaying threats that went against Trump’s political messages.
The 24-page complaint, filed in September 2020, named former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and former Acting Secretary Chad Wolf as attempting to “censor or manipulate” intelligence bulletins related to the interference of the Russia in the presidential election and the threat of national white supremacist groups. .
“I became a whistleblower because when I came to DHS in 2018, right from the start, everything I stood for – you know, finding the objective truth when I was in the FBI and served in the Marines and that I was serving the American public – I was quickly told that was no longer acceptable, ”Murphy said Sunday.
In his complaint, Murphy further accused Nielsen, Wolf and other senior officials of rushing to collect and prepare intelligence reports aligned with Trump’s public remarks in the months leading up to the 2020 election.
“There was intense pressure to try to take intelligence and adjust to a political narrative,” Murphy said Sunday. “When I first came to DHS, it was all about politics.”
In one instance, Murphy wrote in his complaint that he was “instructed” by Wolf “to stop providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead begin reporting on activities. interference from China and Iran ”.
On Sunday, Murphy said “there had been a push across government to the upper levels – cabinet officials – to do everything possible to quell anything” about Russian interference.
“They didn’t want the American public to know that the Russians were supporting Trump and denigrating what would soon be President Biden,” Murphy added.
Murphy also claimed on Sunday that discussing white supremacy as a threat to national security had become a “third rail problem” within the department after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I didn’t agree with that, I let my superiors know,” Murphy said on Sunday.
A DHS spokesperson said last year that the agency “categorically denies that there is any truth to the merits of Mr. Murphy’s claim.”
Wolf responded last September in a speech that any effort to “portray recent DHS actions as examples of mission drift or politicization … could not be further from the truth.” James Wareham, Nielsen’s attorney, told ABC News at the time that Murphy’s claims “would be laughable if they weren’t so defamatory.”
Murphy’s explosive claims nevertheless fueled concerns that Trump and his appointees had sought to politicize the intelligence process to more closely support the administration’s legislative and political agenda.
Shortly before filing his whistleblower complaint, Murphy was reassigned to the department after it was revealed that his intelligence unit had included tweets from reporters in bulletins distributed to law enforcement networks in across the United States – a practice that experts said was beyond the agency’s jurisdiction.
Asked by Stephanopoulos about it, Murphy said on Sunday that he “understands why, at the time, the media reacted the way they did” to report that his branch gathered publicly-sourced information on reporters, citing the alleged credibility gap between the White House and the American. people.
Murphy added that “at no time did I know or ask anyone in my organization to collect information on journalists.”
“People didn’t trust (the Trump administration). There was a war on the media and I wasn’t going to be a part of it,” Murphy said.
Murphy’s last day at DHS was Friday.
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