"Foundation For Freedom Online" head Mike Benz speaks to the "War Room" podcast about the role the Department of Homeland Security has come to play in domestic politics:
MIKE BENZ: It's important to remember in all of this that DHS is an intelligence agency. DHS has a unique position in our intelligence community. We have 17 different intelligence agencies in this country, but only two of them are domestically focused. One of them is the FBI, and the other one is DHS. DHS is particularly unique because it is the only domestic intelligence agency not tied to the Justice Department.
When we talk about the origins of DHS and domestic censorship online in the US, there's an interesting origin story to that DHS office. It was the product of a long campaign by an organization known as the Atlantic Council, which is known as NATO's think tank in Washington. It has seven former CIA directors on its board and gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy. They penned a memo about a year before that office's creation and then staffed it with a bunch of their people. In that memo, they said they would prefer for the CIA to do this directly. However, they couldn't, so they suggested running domestic censorship out of the Global Engagement Center in the State Department because they had a big network there. This same shop was responsible for censorship of Twitter 1.0 from the State Department side. But they said they couldn't do that because the State Department faces outward.
Then they considered parking it at the CIA because this is the sort of thing the CIA does abroad, containing the spread of hostile adversary media. They couldn't do that for a couple of reasons. One, it's domestic; two, this isn't something that can be run as a clandestine operation due to the logistics and number of people involved. They also considered the FBI, but the problem with the FBI is that it is tied to the Justice Department, and it's not illegal to tweet about mail-in ballots. So, they settled on DHS. DHS is a domestic intelligence agency, but it doesn't require an act of lawbreaking to expand federal sources on it.
At a September 2021 conference reviewing everything they had done to censor the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, a senior adviser to DHS, who was part of the 2020 operation, confessed on tape that they had effectively created a domestic CIA within DHS. This combined the foreign-facing CIA powers that are not allowed at home with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI but without the oversight or lawbreaking necessary related to the Justice Department by parking it at DHS.
Lo and behold, one year later, in 2022, DHS created this domestic intelligence group. This had James Clapper and John Brennan in charge -- the former head of the CIA and intelligence community -- on the day Trump was inaugurated. In those emails that came out via America First legal -- Stephen Miller's group -- who got this thing shut down. And it turned out that this group, this domestic CIA cell within DHS, run by former heads of the CIA and former heads of the entire intelligence community, explicitly targeted Trump supporters. They said that the lion's share of what they needed to focus on were "supporters of President Donald Trump."
This kind of activity launched the Church Committee hearings in 1975, which investigated the domestic activities of our foreign-facing department of dirty tricks. These departments are allowed to overthrow governments and control media around the world but are never supposed to come home. They are supposed to be guard dogs, not attacking our own family. That's what we're up against here.
You see this with DHS and the scandals around the Secret Service. We have so many unanswered questions about the role of the Secret Service in the January 6th pipe bomber story. It took a year for the Justice Department to correct misinformation about Vice President Kamala Harris's location during the event. They eventually admitted that she was near the DNC pipe bomb. She was hand-delivered to the site where the Secret Service was supposed to stop any threats. And we're told the pipe bomb was sitting at the park bench at the entrance to the building. You could walk by, as I did, and have coffee. It was supposed to have sat there for 17 hours... until 1 pm the following day.
And then you have the fact that the FBI has a tape of the pipe bomber taking the pipe bomb out of the bag but has not disclosed it fully. They had a stationary camera focused on the park bench where the bomber placed the device, but they cut the footage before he took it out of the bag. There are many inconsistencies, such as the FBI claiming the bomber's cell phone data was corrupted, the only case of corrupted data among 1,500 January 6th indictments.
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It seems like the FBI kills the evidence, the Secret Service looks the other way, and that's how we end up with these significant attacks on democracy.
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