The Secret Service News Is Bad, But Big-Picture Homeland Security Is A Mess Too
The Secret Service News Is Bad, But Big-Picture Homeland Security Is A Mess Too
It's becoming clearer what it means to have an authoritarian wannabe corrupt government and break down institutions.
We're in a veritable civics explosion.
Looks like Trump made more serious tracks than we knew through the US Secret Service.
When the Trump Administration started, I knew he could do some very, very deep damage to the institution that is Homeland Security.
The department was very unstable.
It was legally authorized in 2002, and started to be slowly put together in 2003. I moved over in 2005 when it was only a year and a half old, although technically it was more of a framework run out of the White House for its first 9 months or so. So I came in in its first real year.
I worked with very many US Secret Service detailees, as they were leveraged heavily to help get the new department stood up.
They had a big influence on shaping the department, because people from the agencies that came to make up DHS were needed to help put it together. Especially at the headquarters level - where the fusion of all of the parts met.
The Secret Service had more flexibility than other agencies to stick people at DHS headquarters, so there they were.
The thing about working in the US government's third-largest and brand-newest department for nearly a decade is it's so freaking complicated to explain just about anything.
All of the things are interwoven and interconnected and messy.
DHS was not a stable department.
It was not put together well. It's bureaucracy was vulnerable. The employees it brought in to run it as a new department were not brought in from the best places to run the department with its mission.
Like they were ex-military, but we needed people who understood the domestic US and the complications of federalism and state and local government. And the Constitution.
The bureaucracy that DHS built was not built for agility and speed and flexibility.
Bureaucracy is meant to help government run, but also meant to be a block against political whims.
That works better if it's an old and well-functioning bureaucracy.
That's not the case at all at Homeland Security.
Also, its inception almost immediately created a new homeland security industrial base comparable to the military industrial base. Involving a lot of the same players.
The US government's tendency is to heavily contract enormous parts of government because of decades of pressure, so that's also a feature at DHS.
Contractors themselves have an enormous influence on the department, and contribute to the difficulty of federal employees to shape it's direction and functionality.
Another thing is that DHS is freaking loaded with political appointees, especially at the headquarters level.
What that means is that it has less non-political high level people to hold it stable when an Administration changes.
A new Administration can bring in a veritable cornucopia of its own new people and plug them in all over DHS.
Most of those political appointees don't have to go through the Senate confirmation process, and just get stuck right in roles that shape and influence what the department does.
There are lots of other reasons why it's not a stable department, but those are some of the keys.
Then you get an authoritarian wannabe running the department and sticking his own political appointees in.
Trump blazed in doing damage almost immediately.
One of the first things Trump set about doing was getting rid of decades of tracking of domestic violent extremists, including especially white supremacists.
He also tried to politicize and skew the release of border statistics to fit his own agenda. Some lone employee whistleblew that... and then lo and behold the news disappeared before it got wide coverage.
Trump did the Muslim Ban, which involved DHS.
He did the family separation policy at the border without any care at all whatsoever about what happened to any of the humans after they were separated.
Zero care went into actually even labeling the people who made up the families, or doing paperwork.
Many remain damaged and torn apart to this day.
Children were stuck in cages.
Tents that were on easy DHS contracts for mass migration contingencies were used to stick children in as they were torn from the only people they'd ever known.
As a side note, I'm pretty sure some of the people I worked with were involved in all that mishegoss.
After the George Floyd murder in 2020, Trump used DHS structures that were put together to protect monuments and government facilities... and aimed them at anti-racism protesters.
DHS then further dismantled tracking of domestic violence extremists and white supremacists, because those groups were clashing with the anti-racism protesters and they tended to support Trump.
It was one of many nods of support back to their very clear support for him. No doubt that also contributed to the insurrection and coup attempt on January 6th.
Trump and his Homeland Security administration/posse dismantled regular domestic security bulletins to local law enforcement in the summer and fall of 2020. This intelligence function dismantling is significant and huge.
It represents a massive weakening of DHS. It specifically tore apart things that the department was built to do to make this country more secure. It's not clear how much of that has been reestablished properly since that time.
In reference to the insurrection and coup attempt, DHS is responsible for security of government facilities, including in partnerships with the US Capitol Police.
There are about 20 federal law enforcement agencies operating in the Washington DC area.
Several of them are DHS, but many of them are more coordinated with ir through DHS in some way. Federal departments and agencies have many of their own law enforcement outside of what's at DHS and DOJ.
Then there was the coup attempt and the insurrection.
And now we're seeing how completely funky and corrupt the US Secret Service has gotten, but also possibly even the DHS Inspector General which is supposed to be the watchdog for the department.
Not only did the US Secret Service, an agency that is supposed to be an expert at data and cyber, delete its own agents text messages involved in a massive law enforcement incident... but news has broken that the Inspector General's office knew about that data deletion and did not report it to the January 6th Committee.
At least a couple of media personalities have figured out that maybe part of the reason this super suspicious January 6th text message data deletion happened at the US Secret Service is because a Trump political appointee - or a group of them - made it happen.
But that's not been most of the reporting on this issue.
Heaven knows what's going on with the Inspector General's function in the department. That's not looking good.
But is it a surprise?
I refer you to the rest of this post for the answer.
No. It's not a surprise.
DHS was not stable or well-functioning before the Trump Administration.
It would have been very, very, very easy to corrupt and repoint it for your own purposes if you were a corrupt Administration.
Which leads one to wonder... how much more damage is there inside Homeland Security?
How much less secure are we as a nation because of the Trump Administration and its dismantling and corruption of the United States Department of Homeland security?
And that's just one department.
If you are shocked by the breathtaking news that's come out about the Secret Service and now the inspector general, imagine how shocked you could be finding out about the rest of the department. Or the government.
Will we ever even find out things like what the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security was doing on the day of January 6th? Or the Acting Attorney General?
Will we find out that the acting Secretary of Homeland Security took actions to not be ready for an insurrection?
What about the entire footprint of security mechanisms put in place to protect government facilities? Was the vast network of watch offices, task forces, and intelligence functions undermined in more ways than what we've already seen?
Why did the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security not declare a National Security Special Event (NSSE) for January 6th, given the absolutely clear threat landscape?
The publicly available information on the threat totally met NSSE parameters, and would have given the US Capitol the kind of security like we would see on the day of any State of the Union speech.
How much continuity of government stuff did or did not happen to protect the continuity of constitutional government on the day of the insurrection and coup attempt?
How much of that was deliberate or not?
How much of that was obstructed?
I have questions.
You probably do, too.
I suspect that whatever comes out of the hearings later today is not going to address any of this stuff.
Yet it's still unsettled and unanswered.
And this post focused only on one department.
What about the rest of government?
How much of this has gotten fixed or worked on since the insurrection and coup attempt?
After 9/11 when we rearranged government we had a semi-coordinated national and bipartisan effort to get our ducks in a row and do things differently.
We're totally not doing that now.
In fact the threat remains active, and democracy is still under attack. By one of the United States' own political parties tied to the insurrection + coup.
So here's the thing. This is all probably kind of mind-blowing. It is for me.
Even in light of that, I'm convinced we can do some things to at least help hold democracy together.
I'm convinced we can stabilize this government, and even get it to go in a direction where government serves Americans better. It's totally not doing that well at all right now. In addition to being seriously threatened and deeply damaged.
It's no small feat to navigate this level of chaos and make shift happen in the middle of it. We have to.
Democracy dies in darkness - and chaos and overwhelm.
We've got a very brand new nonprofit to help work on this.
The idea is to create a phenomenon of civic engagement and action and outrage and voices and demands and all kinds of things to help get through this, to help leaders fight differently, and to help win enough seats to be able to better stabilize and protect the democracy.
We're still building some of our own infrastructure. We will have about 30 online events between Tuesday July 26th and August 5th. They will help us get this shift going.
We will have a schedule for creating a phenomenon.
Yes that's right. We're creating a phenomenon, and we're brazenly creating a schedule to do so. Because we can.
We're going to be asking any or all of you to help us get involved in making this shift happen.
So check out the website. Get signed up. We'll have more in the next few days on the events and the specific volunteer opportunities.
All is not lost. But probably we're going to get more breathtaking information about how much trouble we're in. Especially like today when we've got a January 6th primetime hearing.
There are things we can do. Our point is that we can do things differently than we've ever tried.
It's time to go all out. We absolutely have to. What do we have to lose? Everything.
This. Democracy. Is. In. Jeopardy.
It's time to fight for it. I'd like to keep it. I think we can.
You in?
Get even more in on this shift at www.shiftthecountry.com.
We’ll also post every major update here on this newsletter. And you can help get this going by passing this message along to at least three people you know. We have to move info through our social networks - that’s totally part of our 5-part approach
Be safe -