Homeland Security Admits It Launched Failed Operation To Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump

The Department of Homeland Security admitted it attempted to manufacture fake terrorists for Donald Trump.

Its failed operation captured hundreds to thousands of U.S. protesters as an all-out, power-hungry effort ahead of the 2020 election to support Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting, according to documents of a new internal investigation.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, made the documents public and detailed the findings of the previously undisclosed attempt by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf.  Wolf is accused of trying to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests for George Floyd in the summer of 2020.

The report lists top officials who tried to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in what was likely an effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, which now raises concerns about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars worth of domestic intelligence assets for their political gain.

DHS analysts recounted orders to make evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody that would have served to support President Trump’s false claims about “Antifa,” an “organization” that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to prove ever existed.  Luckily, the plot failed.

One field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily “thrown together” and that they “didn’t even know why some of the people were arrested.” While in other cases, it was unclear whether the arrests were made by police or by one of the several federal agencies on the ground, MSN reported.  The analysts never received arrest affidavits or paperwork, a witness told investigators, adding that they “just worked off the assumption that everyone on the list was arrested.”

The agency’s chief intelligence officer, Brian Murphy,  acknowledged fielding requests by Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to create dossiers “against everyone participating in the Portland protest,” even if they were or were not accused of any crime, the report continues.  Murphy, then head of the agency’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), told interviewers that he’d turned down the idea and told his bosses that he could only “look at people who were arrested” and said that it was something his office had done “thousands” of times before.

The DHS report was completed more than a year ago and included descriptions of orders handed down to “senior leadership” that instructed them to broadly apply the label “violent Antifa anarchists inspired” to Portland protesters unless they had intel showing “something different.”

Once the dossiers were provided to the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to link the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor internationally.  Efforts to come up with evidence to support the administration’s claim that a “larger network was directing or financing” the protesters, which was a task assigned to another unit, known as the Homeland Identities, Targeting and Exploitation Center, back away from its usual work of analyzing national security threats — “did not find any evidence that assertion was true,” the report says.