by Philip Haney
Al-Qaeda’s ideology may be many things, but it is not a fringe religious view that exists outside mainstream Islamic beliefs and practices. Like the core teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood – the ideological parent of al-Qaeda – it is based on Quranic doctrine and sharia, and Muslims around the world know this is true.
On the evening of June 19, 2013, I had an opportunity to discuss these concerns with House Homeland Security vice-chairman Jeff Duncan. During a sidebar conversation between just the two of us, I showed him evidence of what I called a “Trojan horse” within his committee.
The evidence was a series of five documents, which I laid on a small table in chronological order. One was a copy of the CAIR report to his House committee, another was a report I had compiled on Ali Suleiman Ali – one of the principal plaintiffs in the CAIR lawsuit against CBP in Detroit – and the other three documents were related to the lawsuit.
Why did I refer to the CAIR report as a “Trojan horse”? Because CAIR would not have submitted such a report unless it was solicited and accepted by someone within the House committee.
The next day, June 20, 2013, I gave a PowerPoint presentation to Sen. Tom Coburn’s investigative staff. My presentation reiterated what I had just shared with Duncan and touched on many related issues.
My observations about CAIR were of particular interest to Coburn because he had written a February 24, 2009, letter to FBI director Robert Mueller to express his own concerns about the FBI’s relationship with the organization.
11
KILL THE MESSENGER
On a sultry afternoon in late July 2013, I stood in front of the Ford House Office Building near the US Capitol with former Defense Department inspector general Joseph E. Schmitz and Republican Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair. We had just finished a forty-five-minute meeting at the offices of the House Committee on Homeland Security with Charles K. Edwards, the acting inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, with four or five other staff members from both the House and Senate in attendance.
Standing in the middle of Second Street, in plain sight of the US Capitol and the Rayburn House Office Building, Schmitz looked right at me and tapped his forehead with his right index finger. “Philip,” he said, “the things you know, the things you have between your ears, people will kill you for.”
As we were riding back to the Rayburn Building a few minutes later, Schmitz also remarked that I had “cases embedded within cases, just in the short briefing you gave to the IG.”
Schmitz’s ominous warning set off an avalanche of memories, as I recalled the countless times my friends – many with former military and law-enforcement experience – and my colleagues in Customs and Border Protection had told me the same thing. Since as far back as 2006, when this whole ordeal began, their sincere warnings of, “Watch your back, Haney,” had become a familiar refrain.
On July 31, 2013, in compliance with Edwards’s directive during the briefing, House Homeland Security committee chairman Michael McCaul, R-TX, and Senate Homeland Security Committee and Governmental Affairs ranking member Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, submitted a signed letter to Edwards requesting that his office “investigate with particular sensitivity to the whistleblower’s work situation and request ongoing updates as facts become known.”
Remarkably, on that same day, I was being interviewed in Atlanta by two CBP Internal Affairs contract investigators about my involvement in the Alharbi case.
As I soon discovered, both CBP and the DOJ suspected I was the one who leaked details of a report related to the Boston Marathon bombing that originally came from the National Targeting Center. (See last chapter.)
The affidavit shows they not only asked me why I had accessed Alharbi’s event file, but also what websites I browsed, how often I watched Fox News, what my opinion of Glenn Beck was, and my personal e-mail address.
TO THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
On August 15, 2013, I met with Office of Inspector General Special Agent Davis (not his real name) in his downtown Atlanta office to review the case and talk about what to expect. During our meeting, I also showed him the PowerPoint briefing that I had presented to Edwards in Washington, DC.
We met in the Atlanta branch office, because as IG Edwards had plainly stated to everyone in the room, the working plan was to transfer the case down to the IG branch office in Atlanta, my home port, so that I would be available, if needed, during the investigation.
However, just a few days after meeting with Davis, I received a phone call from another OIG special agent, whom I’ll call Agent Michaels, who said that the IG investigation was being transferred back up to Washington, DC.
I asked him why.
“The investigation was requested by members of the House and Senate, and it will go to the highest levels of the government,” he explained.
When I finally met Michaels for the first time on November 13, 2013, I gave him the PowerPoint presentation that I had given to Edwards and Davis, and also provided copies of all the files and documents I had that were related to the investigation.
Then, in another twist of fate, Edwards resigned in disgrace in December 2012 from his IG position after it was discovered that he had been allowing DHS officials – the very targets of his investigations – to review and edit his final reports.
Looking back, I have often wondered why Edwards took my case in the first place. By June 2013, if not earlier, he knew he was under investigation himself.
But I am thankful that he did. Of nearly all the public officials I encountered during this long ordeal, he was among the most straightforward and efficient. Though many things have been said about him, he gave me, an unknown CBP officer from Atlanta, the chance to state my case. I will never forget how alarmed and serious he was during that forty-five-minute briefing in the Ford Building, when he told the people in the room how he wanted them to proceed with the case.
It was just three months after the Boston Marathon bombing, and some of the most incriminating information I presented that day was directly related to the attack.
Just before the meeting, one of my legal advisers cautioned me that I needed to capture Edwards’s attention within the first two or three minutes of the briefing, and that if it went on for much more than thirty minutes, people would start to lose focus.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about capturing anyone’s attention.
It wasn’t two minutes into the presentation before Edwards, nearly yelling, said, “This is really a problem!”
For a few moments, everyone was quiet, and then he said it again.
I continued walking through the PowerPoint slides, and just a minute or two later, Edwards interjected once again. This time, as he pointed his index finger toward me, he announced to the entire room: “Mr. Haney, we need to protect you, and we need to protect this information!”
Four months earlier, House Homeland Security Chairman McCaul had told me exactly the same thing as we were huddled around a computer screen in his office.
From whom did I need protection? Were they talking about enraged jihadists from the Middle East? I suspect it was from somewhere much closer to home. In any case, I decided it was best not to take any chances.
THE STATE OF OUR UNION
On Monday, January 27, 2014, I videoed my entire story, from start to finish, in the office of the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It took seven hours to cover everything, and Reps. Louie Gohmert and Steve King of Iowa took turns being with me during that time, pointing at a big-screen TV and asking questions along the way.
The following day, I gave a one-hour briefing to four members of Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley’s research and investigation staff, including Jim Donahue, Jason Foster, and Tristan Leavitt.
By early that afternoon, it had started snowing down in Atlanta, shutting down the airport. I was scheduled to return to Atlanta that afternoon – in fact, I was supposed to qualify on the shooting range the next morning – but no
w I was stuck in Washington.
It also happened to be the day President Obama was scheduled to give his State of the Union address before both houses of Congress.
Since I was now stranded in DC, Representative Gohmert asked if I would like to spend the rest of the day with him.
Before the evening was over, I ended up attending a private gathering at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in downtown Washington with Sen. Ted Cruz, Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, talk-radio host and author Mark Levin, Duck Dynasty’s Willie J. Robertson and his wife, and about ten or fifteen other guests. Representative Gohmert was there with his wife, Kathy, and his chief of staff, Connie Hair.
As we talked about the state of our union and the coming November midterm elections, Hannity stood and proposed a toast to America.
Then, Newt Gingrich followed suit, proposing a toast to the principles of the Constitution.
I paused for a few moments, then decided to stand and recite my favorite passage from Abraham Lincoln’s December 1, 1862, message to Congress: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise – with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
A week or two later, a photograph from the evening was posted on the TMZ website.1 By the time I reported for duty that day, it had captured the attention of my colleagues.
“Haney, was that really you in the TMZ picture?”
“That’s not really you, is it?”
“It was Photoshopped, right?”
Meanwhile, since our first in-person meeting on November 13, 2013, OIG Special Agent Michaels and I had been talking on the phone and exchanging text messages. He had asked me on December 9 for additional information, so I knew he was working the case. He also called a couple of times near the end of December to ask who else I might want him to interview.
On January 29, 2014, the snow in Atlanta had cleared up and the airport was open again. While I was waiting at Reagan National for my flight back home, I decided to text Michaels: “Are you free sometime tomorrow?” I wanted to see whether it would be possible to brief the incoming inspector general, whenever he was finally appointed and confirmed.
He responded, “I’m tied up today; but, no … you do not need to try to brief the incoming IG.”
The exchange troubled me. Why wouldn’t the incoming IG want to be briefed on my case? After all, I thought this investigation was requested by both the House and the Senate, and that it was going to go “to the highest levels of the government.”
At that moment, it started to dawn on me that the IG investigation was becoming yet another long ordeal – a whole new complicated process with a whole set of new rules and a whole new cast of characters.
ENTERING DIALOGUE
At this point in the story, it’s helpful to recall major events in the rest of the world that had a direct bearing on my motivation to remain engaged in this long battle with DHS and the administration.
On February 13, 2014, deputy spokesperson for the US State Department Marie Harf declared at a press conference that the United States “does not rank the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.”
“This is in the context of the U.S.’s attempts to enter dialogue with all parties of the political process in Egypt,” she said.2
There was that word again, “dialogue.”
Later in the year, the administration would go even further in its support of the Muslim Brotherhood. On December 1, 2014, the White House rejected a “We the People” petition to declare the Muslim Brotherhood organization a terrorist group. The petition garnered more than two hundred thousand signatures, far beyond the one-hundred-thousand-signature threshold needed for a response. The White House stated:
We have not seen credible evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has renounced its decades-long commitment to non-violence.
The United States does not condone political violence of any kind and we continue to press actors of all viewpoints to peacefully engage in the political process. The United States is committed to thwarting terrorist groups that pose a threat to U.S. interests and those of our partners.3
In the middle of the official White House statement was another of the administration’s favorite buzzwords: “engage.”
Joined together, “engagement and dialogue” form the basis of America’s current counterterrorism foreign policy. In fact, “engagement and dialogue” is synonymous with the administration’s domestic counterterrorism policy, Countering Violent Extremism.
On a side note, apparently, “pressing actors of all viewpoints” included the administration’s decision to cut off foreign aid to the Egyptian military government to encourage the military to reconcile with the Muslim Brotherhood and perhaps be more inclusive towards them in the new government.4
TEACHING TRICKS OF THE TRADE
In early 2014, I was told I would be allowed to go on a six-month TDY assignment to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), in Glynco, Georgia.
I had put in for it a couple of months earlier but really didn’t expect to be approved. I was doubtful partly because the February 5, 2013, Letter of Council from the Islamic Institute of Education investigation was probably still in my personnel file. Technically, federal personnel aren’t supposed to be promoted, change jobs, or go on any TDY assignments if they are involved in any kind of active investigation. Also, the IG investigation was still going on. Even though it was supposed to be on my behalf and not against me, it was nonetheless an active investigation.
Another reason why I had doubts that I would be approved was that candidates for consideration as FLETC instructors must be among the best of the best in CBP. Since FLETC instructors are the first contact that most new recruits have with the agency, we are vetted not only by our home port to make sure we met the selection criteria, but also by FLETC personnel who are in charge of the training program.
A thumbs-down by either team, and you don’t make the cut.
As adversarial as my relationship with the CBP chain of command had been for the last few years, I didn’t think they would approve my request.
But to FLETC I was going, and on February 18, 2014, I reported for duty along with about twenty other CBP officers from around the country. As we went through the two-week Instructor Certification course, many of us became friends.
FLETC turned out to be among the most enjoyable assignments of my entire CBP career. I loved interacting with the new students, teaching them the little tricks of the trade and sharing war stories. Many of the new recruits were military veterans, and they had some harrowing war stories themselves.
FLETC instructors are not allowed to socialize with the students, especially outside of class, but often, during breaks, I would just sit quietly in the back and listen to them talk, and, boy, did I get an earful.
On February 25, 2014, during a break between classes, I called Michaels.
He answered and told me that the investigation had been completed, but he couldn’t release it to me, because it still had to be submitted for final review, and parts of it might change.
That sounded odd. “It might change?” I asked.
Who would change it?
At that time, we were still in the interim between when Edwards resigned in late 2013, and when John Roth, former director of the Office of Criminal Investigations at the Food and Drug Administration, took over on March 10, 2014.
VOICE FOR MUSLIMS
Coincidentally, on the same day, a press release announced that on March 12, eight major national American Muslim organizations would hold a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to announce the formation of the US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), an umbrella group that would “serve as a representative voice for Muslims as that faith community seeks to enhance its positive impact on society.”5
The ei
ght organizations were Mosque Cares (of Imam W. Deen Mohammed), Muslim American Society, American Muslims for Palestine, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim Legal Fund of America, Muslim Alliance in North America, and the Muslim Ummah of North America.
It was most of the same cast of characters that I had been researching as far back as 2006, only this time they were forming a new coalition.
In a statement prior to the planned launch, the new coalition’s secretary general, Oussama Jammal, declared that a “national council unifying Muslims in the United States has long been a dream of our community. The goal of the US Council of Muslim Organizations,” he continued, “is to help strengthen relationships among the member organizations in order to better serve members of the Muslim community and all Americans. A detailed census will allow the larger Muslim community to better participate in our nation’s political process.”6
I recognized Jammal’s name immediately. For years, he had been a close affiliate and business partner of Kifah Mustapha, another Holy Land Foundation unindicted coconspirator.
Together, they lead the Mosque Foundation,7 better known as the Bridgeview Mosque, in Chicago, which has ties to numerous other Muslim Brotherhood–linked individuals and organizations involved in the Holy Land Foundation trial. The entire Bridgeview Mosque network was also included in my 2006 Hamas report.
Just four days later, on March 14, 2014, the State Department’s Marie Harf met with foreign journalists and confirmed, once again, that the United States was in direct communication with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while denying that this outreach represented support for the organization:
QUESTION: So do you think that these contacts have any effect on the United States relations with Egypt? And are these just mere contacts or support? Because this is very important for the Egyptian public opinion. Thanks.