Mike Huckabee
Several days ago, news reports of the violent death of Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney, age 66, stunned his friends and colleagues. His body, with one gunshot wound to the chest, was found on the ground near his car, close to an intersection of two major roads near his home in the San Francisco area. As is typical in such cases, details were conflicting at first: his death had been quickly ruled a suicide; no, it hadn’t; the weapon had not been found at the scene; yes, it had. The family did not suspect foul play; yes, they did.
But now, a few facts in the case have been released by the Amador County Sheriff’s office. The case is still under investigation and has not been ruled a suicide. (Be aware that deaths are not supposed to be ruled suicide until investigators have ruled out homicide, and that has not happened in this case.) Earlier in the week, they issued a statement saying, “Unfortunately, there was misinformation immediately being put out that we have determined Mr. Haney’s death to be a suicide. This is not the case. We are currently in the beginning phase of our investigation, and any final determination as to the cause and manner of Mr. Haney’s death would be premature and extremely inappropriate. No determination will be made until all the evidence is examined and analyzed.”
Haney’s body was found not on the side of the road as first imagined from the reports but in a park-and-ride area right off California state Highway 16, a busy thoroughfare, and close to state Highway 124, about 40 miles east of Sacramento. This location is less than three miles from the RV park where Haney was residing. The day his body was found, sheriff’s investigators examined the area for any points of video surveillance (at this writing, they haven’t released that information), and they went to his RV park and interviewed his neighbors. They also scheduled a forensic autopsy, to be performed by forensic pathologists from the office of the Sacramento County Coroner.
In contrast to early reports, the firearm WAS found at the scene, and investigators have it, along with Mr. Haney’s RV. From the scene and from inside the RV, they also retrieved his phone, some documents and a laptop, and to help them analyze these potential pieces of evidence, they’ve reportedly enlisted the aid of “their law enforcement partners in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” (I know what you’re thinking when I say the letters “FBI.” That’s because I’m thinking the same thing.)
Recall what I wrote about Haney right after the first reports of his death. He worked at DHS during the Obama years, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2016 that his agency made him erase hundreds of files he’d accumulated on people with connections to Islamist terrorist organizations. (It had been his job to compile exactly that kind of information.) He made the case that certain terrorist attacks might have been prevented if the pertinent files had not been deleted. In an opinion piece written for THE HILL in 2016, he wrote about how “demoralizing and infuriating” that was.
It truly is infuriating that this is what was going on in President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. “[Obama’s] administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material –- the intelligence we had collected for years,” Haney said. Then when an attack would occur, he said, Obama would excoriate the officials at DHS for failing to “connect the dots.” Obama had made them erase those very dots.
And Haney said this, which sums up the problem with refreshing bluntness: “After leaving my 15-year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness --- and subsequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.”
Here is the piece Haney wrote --- an absolute MUST-READ.
And this is the latest news report on the investigation into Haney’s death. They’re not saying much at this time, which is to be expected.
But we do know more from his friends. Sources close to Haney said he’d recently been in contact with top officials about returning to work at Homeland Security. As I mentioned, he lost his wife to cancer about a year ago but had met someone and was planning to be married soon.
RELATED READING: Who was Philip Haney and why did he die?
Haney co-authored a book called “SEE SOMETHING, SAY NOTHING: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad.” In November, he sent a text to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER that mentioned he was planning a sequel. Interestingly, Haney’s text also referred to anti-Turmp “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella (whom I continue to name because he is NOT entitled to anonymity): “Odd (surreal reality) that I was a highly visible whistleblower...that virtually no one listened to, while this guy remains invisible, but is treated like an anointed oracle from above. However, my story is still live, i.e., there’s still more to come. It’ll be called ‘National Security Meltdown.’”
Haney went on, sounding in this text like someone very much involved in this new project: “I have a severely hyper-organized archive of everything that’s happened since See Something, Say Nothing (SSSN) was published in May of 2016. The National Security Meltdown sequel will pick up right where SSSN left off. My intention is to have it ready by by early- to mid-Spring of 2020 (just before the political sound wave hits), then ride that wave all the way to the Nov. elections.)”
Well, that’s one wave Mr. Haney won’t be riding. It’ll be interesting to see if this manuscript-in-progress turns up at all, and if it does, what forensic analysis will say about it. And, no, I don’t mean the FBI’s forensic analysis --- this looks like another investigation that needs to be dropped in the lap of John Durham. It’s sad to have to say that no one else at the federal level can be entrusted with it.
I’m not going to speculate about Haney’s death at this point, given that all the information we have is secondhand and it’s still very early. But friends and colleagues have reportedly said that he had a deep faith in God, believed suicide was a sin, and had told them various versions of “If I’m ever found dead, and they try to say it was suicide, it wasn’t.” For now, let’s leave it at that.
And here’s a piece by Andew C. McCarthy at NATIONAL REVIEW that Haney surely would have wanted to read, as it’s about the Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR), a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their efforts to keep people from seeing a movie called HONOR DIARIES, which documents the inequality and brutality suffered by women in strict Muslim-majority societies. By working through chapters of the Muslim Students Association, they’re succeeding in getting it banned from several college campuses, starting with (where else?) the University of Michigan at Dearborn. This sounds like a movie that really deserves to be seen, and I’ll bet Philip Haney would have appreciated it.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/04/cairs-jihad-against-honor-diaries-andrew-c-mccarthy/
