WASHINGTON -- A senior Department of Homeland Security official said in a whistleblower complaint released Wednesday that he was told to stop providing intelligence analysis that President Donald Trump might find objectionable, including information about Russian interference in the election.
The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, said in the complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat.
On July 8, Murphy said Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, told him that an "intelligence notification" regarding the Kremlin's disinformation efforts should be "held" because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided Russian interference as a "hoax" that was concocted by his opponents to delegitimize his victory in 2016.
It's not clear who would have seen the notification, but Homeland Security's intelligence reports are routinely shared with the FBI, other federal law enforcement agencies, and state and local governments.
Murphy objected to Wolf's instruction, "stating that it was improper to hold a vetted intelligence product for reasons [of] political embarrassment," according to the complaint, which was released Wednesday by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Murphy also says in the complaint that two months earlier, Wolf told him to stop producing intelligence assessments on Russia and shift the focus on election interference to China and Iran. He said Wolf told him "that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien."
Murphy said he would not comply with the instructions, which he believed would "put the country in substantial and specific danger," according to the complaint, which was filed Tuesday with the Homeland Security Department's inspector general.
A Homeland Security spokesman, Alexei Woltornist, said the department generally does not comment on referrals to the inspector general but denied Murphy's allegations. "DHS looks forward to the results of any resulting investigation and we expect it will conclude that no retaliatory action was taken against Mr. Murphy," he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint, which also asks that officials who retaliated against Murphy be given written reprimands, was filed by Mark Zaid, a prominent attorney who also represented the whistleblower who spurred the Trump impeachment inquiry.
Zaid said in a statement that Murphy "followed proper, lawful whistleblower rules in reporting serious allegations of misconduct" and would cooperate with congressional investigations into the matter, especially in a classified setting.
PANEL TESTIMONY
Schiff said in a statement that Murphy's complaint "outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically. This puts our nation and its security at grave risk."
"We will get to the bottom of this, expose any and all misconduct or corruption to the American people, and put a stop to the politicization of intelligence," Schiff said.
The committee has asked Murphy to testify this month.
Murphy's allegations track with concerns by other officials, including Democratic lawmakers and national security experts, that the Trump administration has tried to downplay the threat from Russia.
Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated publicly that Russia, China and Iran were engaged in interference campaigns, an assessment that drew rebukes from Democratic lawmakers who said the administration was trying to equate the efforts of all three countries, when in fact Russia is the only one actively trying to help Trump by attacking his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Murphy appeared to share those concerns, stating that the analysis in the intelligence notification, which he said was eventually leaked to the press, "attempts to place the actions of Russia on par with those of Iran and China in a manner that is misleading and inconsistent with the actual intelligence data."
Wolf singled out China as a unique "menacing actor" and singular threat to U.S. national security during a "State of the Homeland" speech to the department's senior officials Wednesday. "China has leveraged every aspect of its country, including its economy, its military, and its diplomatic power, demonstrating a rejection of Western liberal democracy and continually renewing its commitment to remake the world order in its own authoritarian image," he said.
RUSSIA REPORT
The Department of Homeland Security plays a key role in guarding against election interference, mainly by working with state and local governments to ensure that electronic voting systems are protected from hackers and outside manipulation. As part of its mission, the department has sent unclassified bulletins to state and local authorities describing foreign interference.
Recently, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report that Russian media outlets are spreading false allegations that mail-in voting is unsafe, with claims that echo the baseless assertions Trump and Attorney General William Barr have made that voting by mail is rife with fraud.
Murphy stated that after being told to stand down on Russia in May and shift his focus, he made two classified disclosures on the matter in late May to Ken Cuccinelli, the second in command at Homeland Security. The second occurred after a deputies-level meeting of the National Security Council on election security.
Murphy did not provide further details on what he told Cuccinelli, but described his concerns as generally having to do with "abuse of authority, willfully withholding intelligence information from Congress, and the improper administration of an intelligence program."
In his complaint, Murphy said he was also directed by Cuccinelli to modify a section of a report to make the threat posed by white supremacists less severe. He was told to play up the threat posed by left-wing groups to echo administration talking points around civil unrest after the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
Murphy said he refused to alter the report because doing so would "constitute an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program." He was then taken off the project.
Murphy also made a series of allegations in the whistleblower complaint that senior Trump administration officials had pressured him to provide misleading information about suspected terrorists crossing the border with Mexico, as part of an effort to bolster the case for building a border wall.
Homeland Security officials came under pressure from the White House and then-spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders to provide information on "known suspected terrorists" to support construction of the border wall during the government shutdown in January 2019, a former Homeland Security official confirmed.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, was not party to the communications outlined in Murphy's complaint, but said they were consistent with the pressure coming from the White House at the time.
"We were all under pressure to get data on security threats crossing the border," said another former senior Homeland Security official. "The truth was that there is not a significant number of [known suspected terrorists] crossing illegally between ports of entry."
Information for this article was contributed by Shane Harris and Nick Miroff of The Washington Post; and by Ben Fox and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press.