As it turns out, not only were the statistics put forward by last week’s report on immigration and terrorism concocted out of purposeful distortions, but even the source of the memo was falsified.
The document didn’t mince words. It claimed three-quarters of “international terrorism” convicts were immigrants, an assertion meant to bolster Donald Trump’s cherished Muslim-focused ban on entering the country. And the report put the claim in the mouths of an agency assembled to keep Americans safe after 9/11: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The first part of that statement was a lie. The second part … also a lie.
The Department of Homeland Security did not perform that analysis. DHS’ analysts did not contribute to the highly controversial report, The Daily Beast has learned.
Instead, the entire report is a creation of Attorney General Jefferson Sessions, who swept aside statistics on domestic terrorism, mingled together arrests made overseas, and coughed up a set of numbers designed explicitly to support the idea that immigration equals terrorism. Sessions then handed it to Kirstjen “I don’t know if Norway is mostly white” Nielsen, who stamped it with a DHS seal—even though DHS contributed neither data nor analysis.
Career professional analysts at DHS communicated to the Justice Department that the data sought for the report simply did not exist within their department. DHS, multiple sources said, does not track or correlate international terrorism data by citizenship or country of origin, and have warned the Trump administration that doing so risks a misleading portrait of both terrorism and immigration.
The “memo” in #ReleaseTheMemo has turned out to be another of Rep. Devin Nunes’ concoctions created through highly selective editing and falsehoods, and it seems the “report” in this immigration report is just as phony, and even more political.
The idea that the report is based on analysis by the DHS is a lie. And Sessions’ DOJ is anxious to compound that lie.
A Justice Department official told The Daily Beast: “All essential components from DOJ and DHS contributed to the production of the Section 11 Report.”
Another DOJ official maintained that the DHS worked together with the DOJ “for months.” But apparently these statements are only true if the definition of “all essential components” is Nielsen’s signature and if she writes v — e — r— y slowly.
Not only did DHS analysts inform the DOJ that they didn’t even have these statistics, they pointed out that the numbers DOJ was assembling were highly dubious.
Accordingly, some within DHS considered the data request inappropriate, and an indication the administration was laundering a misleading report through the department’s reputation. The lack of the requested data and the internal discomfort about assembling it anyway were among the reasons why the report came months later than the September deadline specified in the executive order.
This report shows that Devin Nunes missed a step on his memo. He should have simply stamped his attack on the FBI with the FBI seal. Sessions probably has one handy.