America First Legal (AFL) scored a significant win last month when it sued the Biden administration and forced it to jettison a panel of “experts” who were supposedly working on better ways to protect national security.
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Now, as a result of the lawsuit, AFL has gathered some rather juicy details about the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group’s inner workings and is publishing them in a series called the “Deep State Diaries.” If the first two releases are any indication, this group was pretty busy before it was dissolved.
As RedState previously reported, Alejandro Mayorkas brought on James Clapper and John Brennan to take part in a panel of national security “experts” to help with issues regarding “terrorism, fentanyl, transborder issues, and emerging technology,” at the DHS.
Both men are credibly accused of lying to Congress and you’ll know them as two of the men responsible for declaring the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop being “Russian disinformation,” a lie that ended up having positive effects for Biden during the 2020 election.
According to the DHS, this group of experts that these two men would be taking part in would hold “a wide range of views and perspectives, with a membership that includes former senior intelligence officials, journalists, and prominent human rights and civil liberties advocates.”
For starters, the documents suggest that the committee was seeking ways to encourage Americans to snitch on one another to the authorities over suspicious behavior.
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By the time the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group was announced in September 2023, the Group had already been meeting for as long as four months. However, during that September meeting, the Group held a discussion on “Collection Posture and Associated Challenges,” where a Group member (likely someone from DHS) complained that there was “no mandate for state land local partners” to collect information which resulted in “limited access in I&A.”
They continued that while “support for this mission set has varied,” it had “changed after January 6th,” as their mission to combat domestic terrorism gained “departmental support” and “political” support.
The group was concerned that former President George W. Bush’s administration’s “See Something, Say Something” campaign after the 9/11 terrorist attacks wasn’t working. The reason why is that “Americans have an ambivalent feeling of telling on each other.” One of the participants asked how DHS could “get into local communities in a non-threatening way” and how people could “safely report a concern about their neighbors.”
Another speaker insisted that more Americans need to be willing to tell on their neighbor if they see something suspicious. “We see people who go off the rails. We need people to say something. We need a nationwide campaign to push it to the locals,” the individual said.
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One of the participants suggested recategorizing “concerning” behavior as a public health matter to make people more comfortable with coming forward.
In another press release, AFL discussed how the group labeled supporters of former President Donald Trump as “domestic terrorists.” In one instance, a participant described “indicators of extremists and terrorism” to be members of the military or “religious.”
The group asserted that there exists a “political backdrop” to supposed threats of domestic terrorism. It said that most of this threat “comes from supporters of the former president” and that “people have attacked the government and its institutions for the last six years.”