WASHINGTON – Former officials of the Department of Homeland Security of the Bush administration, Obama and Trump say the January 6 siege of the United States Capitol exposed the deficiencies of an agency with an inexperienced staff and a mistaken focus on immigration rather than the increase. of internal threats. the past four years.
“They tend to be younger, without much experience. They do not have the incidents under their belts to know the proper protocols. Many protocols were not followed” on January 6, said Elizabeth Neumann, who was deputy chief of Department officials. Homeland Security, or DHS, until April.
Instead, when armed protesters reached the police and entered the Capitol, armed agents from DHS, an agency expressly designed to prevent another terrorist incident such as the September 11, 2001 attacks, stayed inside a nearby building waiting for a command. to deploy that never came. There is also no indication that DHS shared any intelligence with its state and local partners or with the United States Capitol Police before January 6 that would indicate that the protests could turn into a riot.
DHS also failed to designate President Donald Trump’s rally day in Washington as a special national security event, as it did the week before President-elect Joe Biden took office on Wednesday. Had it done so, on January 6 the Secret Service would have been able to coordinate with the National Guard and DHS law enforcement agencies, including the Transportation Security, Customs and Border Protection Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But it was four years of inadequate monitoring and reporting of the growing threat from right-wing extremists that led to DHS’s failure to prevent events on Capitol Hill, former DHS officials said.
Nearly 20 years after the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the United States is in what former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has called “the most strained home security environment since 9/11”, but most The department’s focus has been on fighting immigration rather than violent extremists.
“DHS for the past four years has been used to hammer on the president’s aggressive border security, anti-immigration agenda and not much else has been a priority for the agency,” said Johnson, who served during the Obama administration.
As more experienced and Senate-confirmed home security secretaries like John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen left the Trump administration and were replaced by interim secretaries, they were also experienced lawyers and police officers replaced by Trump loyalists with minimal experience. Most had an important qualification: loyalty to White House adviser Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hawk, Neumann said.
“In order for Miller to approve his policies, he put people in positions that had no qualifications. While Stephen was focused solely on immigration, the department does other things. And the most critical parts of the department were stopped,” said Neumann, who endorsed Biden for president after leaving DHS last year.
The current acting interim secretary is Peter Gaynor, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who was appointed after the abrupt departure this month of interim secretary Chad Wolf. Wolf’s own appointment was deemed illegitimate by a federal judge because an interim secretary who came before him had no authority to appoint him.
The current deputy assistant secretary responsible for engaging the private sector on threats to the homeland graduated from college in 2015.
Acting general counsel, Chad Mizelle, who has the authority to give the go-ahead or block any legal position from the agency, graduated from law school in 2013.
Mizelle, a close ally of Miller, was named after another move in late 2019. His wife, Kathryn Mizelle, was recently nominated by Trump for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge, although the American Bar Association told Senate leaders that she she was “unqualified” because she had never tried a case after she was admitted to practice the law.
“The problem is endemic to the entire government. There is a lack of experience in all sectors. You may be the smartest kid in the world, but at some point experience is important,” said a former senior Trump administration official.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The threat change
As immigration took over the focus of Trump’s DHS, the threat from domestic groups like those who breached the barriers on Capitol Hill increased, and the foreign threats that DHS was established to protect against 9/11 were eclipsed, former officials said .
“DHS, along with the FBI and state and local partners, will have to investigate the groups behind what happened more seriously. [on Jan. 6] and what else can they be planning. This threat has been bubbling for years. … Now it is a bigger threat than jihadism, “said former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who served under George W. Bush.
The emergence of new threats from domestic extremists has not been fully evaluated, even before Trump took office. In 2009, DHS analyst Darryl Johnson suffered a reaction from Congress when he published a report on right-wing extremists.
DHS officials from the former Trump administration claimed that intelligence about right-wing groups was silenced to further Trump’s political agenda.
In September, Brian Murphy, a former head of the DHS intelligence arm, claimed in a whistleblower complaint that agency appointees instructed him to minimize the threat of Russian interference and modify the section of the report on white supremacy “in a way that made the threat seem less severe, as well as include information about the prominence of violent ‘left’ groups. “
A DHS spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on allegations that the agency’s staff had no experience and was too focused on immigration at the expense of domestic extremism.
Restoring trust
Biden is likely to restore parts of the Obama administration’s approach to domestic terrorism, including donations that fund research on white supremacist groups, said a person familiar with the planning of the new government.
But the most difficult reversal will be restoring confidence with the public and with state and local law enforcement leaders, said a former federal official. Many are wary, the official said, of the agency’s aggressive tactics in situations such as the protests this summer in Portland, Oregon, when Customs and Border Patrol clashed with people trying to bypass the federal court.
“Some people see DHS simply as a law enforcement arm of the current government’s political offices, or think it does nothing,” said the former official.
DHS is an amalgamation of agencies from various departments brought together after 9/11. But Chertoff said it was not due to its general structure; he said they were caused by leadership failures during the Trump administration.
Now, he said, “the task is to rebuild trust after Trump’s four years.”