A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official, who had said that “one or more” terror attacks in the U.S. could have been prevented if not for the Obama administration’s prioritizing political correctness over safety, was found dead Friday from a gunshot wound, reports say.
Philip Haney, as a whistleblower, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2016 that DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files of people with ties to Islamist terrorist groups, arguing terrorist attacks against people in the United States could have been prevented if certain files had not been scrubbed, the Washington Examiner noted in a Feb. 22 report.
“It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009,” Haney wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill in February 2016. “It is demoralizing — and infuriating — that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.”
The Amador County Sheriff's office said that deputies and detectives responded to reports Friday morning at 10:12 a.m. of a male subject with a gunshot wound on the ground in the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth, California.
"Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound. A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time," the sheriff's office said in a statement.
Red State and Heavy reported that Haney had been missing since Wednesday, and that the gunshot wound was found in his chest.
Several reports cited friends of Haney as saying they found it difficult to believe that Haney had taken his own life.
The Examiner, citing sources close to Haney as saying he was recently in contact with top officials about returning to work for the DHS. Additionally, Haney was engaged to be married.
Speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, a friend who’s known Haney for 40 years told CCN.com: “Knowing his strong Christian faith, his dogged pursuit of truth and his love for America, and his upcoming marriage, it seems highly unlikely that he committed suicide. He was on a mission to wake up America, and I strongly doubt he took his own life.”
In a 2016 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Haney explained that on two occasions his carefully prepared files had been “purged.” He also believed that, if the Obama administration had maintained this database, several mass shootings, including the December 2015 Orlando, Florida nightclub massacre and the June 2016 San Bernardino, California mass shooting could have been prevented.
In an interview with then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly, Haney said that about a year into an investigation that had led his team to one of the mosques that San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook had attended, officials from the State Department and the Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties showed up at his office to pull the plug.
In his 2016 article for The Hill, Haney claimed President Barack Obama had thrown the U.S. intelligence community "under the bus" for failing to "connect the dots" after a Nigerian Muslim terror suspect was linked to a failed terror plot on Christmas Day in 2009.
"Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused," Haney wrote, referring to Obama. "His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material — the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away."
Haney also called out the Obama administration for prioritizing “political correctness” over safety.
“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, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.”
The Washington Examiner received a text message from Haney on Nov. 11 which mentioned plans to write a sequel to his first book, “See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad”, which described his experience at DHS.
"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," Haney said in the Nov. 11 text, referring to alleged Ukraine whistleblower Eric Ciaramella. "However, my story is still live, i.e., there's still more to come. It'll be called 'National Security Meltdown.' "
Haney added, "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 early-to mid-Spring of 2020 (just before the political sound wave hits), then ride that wave all the way to the Nov. elections."