A senior US intelligence official said that the White House ordered him to stop reporting on Russian election interference, and highlight Chinese and Iranian meddling instead, according to a whistle-blower complaint revealed on Wednesday.
Offering explosive evidence to support Democratic allegations that US President Donald Trump has manipulated intelligence to support his re-election bid, US Department of Homeland Security analyst Brian Murphy said that he was told by Acting US Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf that assessments on the Russian threat made Trump “look bad.”
Wolf told him that the order to stifle his analysis “specifically originated from White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien,” a top Trump aide, Murphy said in the complaint.
Photo: AFP
Murphy, a senior official in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the department, said that he refused to censor his reporting on Russian interference and the domestic white supremacist threat, “as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.”
In retaliation, he said that he was demoted last month.
The complaint, released by the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, came after months of reports that the White House was downplaying the Russian election threat, despite what US intelligence chiefs have said was massive interference in the 2016 campaign.
In a widely criticized official statement on election interference on Aug. 7, the US Directorate of National Intelligence focused on what it said was active interference by China and Iran, with China opposed to Trump.
Russia is also interfering against former US vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, and an anti-Russia “establishment,” it said, avoiding suggestions that, as in 2016, Moscow favors Trump.
The department rejected the allegations of intelligence manipulation and retaliation against Murphy.
“We flatly deny that there is any truth to the merits of Mr Murphy’s claim,” department spokesman Alexei Woltornist said.
The White House has denied manipulating intelligence to support Trump’s policies and re-election, but also repeatedly condemns what it labels an alleged anti-Trump “deep state” in the intelligence community.
Murphy’s complaint said that, between 2018 and this year, he witnessed “a repeated pattern of abuse of authority, attempted censorship of intelligence analysis and improper administration of an intelligence program related to Russian efforts to influence and undermine United States interests.”
In a July 8 meeting, Murphy said that Wolf told him his report on election interference had to be held back “because it ‘made the president look bad.’”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said that Murphy’s complaint “outlines grave and disturbing allegations” of manipulation and censorship of intelligence “in order to benefit President Trump politically.”
“This puts our nation and its security at grave risk,” he said.
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