The Biden administration’s since-disbanded “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group” planned an insidious influence operation to persuade mothers and teachers to inform on dissident parents and students suspected of “domestic extremism,” internal documents obtained by The Post show.
The panel, created in September of last year to ostensibly “provide advice and perspectives on intelligence and national security efforts,” included Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom flaunted their intelligence credentials on the eve of the 2020 election to falsely claim The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
But conservative non-profit America First Legal (AFL) alleged in a November 2023 lawsuit that the group was stacked with Democrat partisans and violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act because of its “lack of balance, the Biden Administration’s inappropriate influence over it, and its lack of public notice and participation.”
DHS agreed to disband the group and to provide AFL with its internal records as part of an out-of-court settlement in May.
Now, the records have been obtained and provide a chilling insight into the ambitions of this shadowy organization.
In notes from a September 2023 meeting, the Brennan-Clapper group discussed ways for DHS to increase efforts to collect intelligence on Americans across the country, and “get into local communities in a non-threatening way.”
Members noted that “Americans have an ambivalent feeling of telling on each other,” citing the failure of the post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” campaign.
The problem, one attendee summarized, was: “How do people safely report a concern about their neighbors?”
One solution proposed at the meeting was to reclassify political dissent as a “public health” crisis to encourage Americans to report family members or neighbors to the federal government if they displayed “concerning” behavior.
“To get a mother or teacher to come forward, it needs to be a public health catcher’s mitt,” one participant was quoted as saying.
If DHS could not convince mothers and teachers to become informants, one member of the group suggested, the feds should turn to corporate America as a resource of intelligence on their employees.
“There is an industry ecosystem, companies are internally collecting open sources,” this person mused. “Are you able to engage and use those products?”
The meeting notes also reveal that “departmental support [and] political … support for this mission” had increased after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The plans have strong echoes of East Germany’s secret police agency, the Stasi, which relied on a network of unofficial informants to report friends, family, and neighbors as potential dissidents to the socialist regime between 1950 and 1990.
“Thanks to America First Legal, we were able to get the Biden team’s personal documents outlining their strategy to monitor and intimidate dissenting views,” said Ric Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence in the Trump administration, who partnered with AFL in the suit against DHS.
“It is shocking to see such intolerance and paranoia in written form.”
The revelations are the first installment of what AFL is calling the “Deep State Diaries,” which promise to include more documents obtained from the disbanded group’s archives.
