An Obama-era whistleblower was found dead Friday morning in Northern California, after suffering a single gunshot wound.
Philip Haney, one of the founding members of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), exposed the Obama Administration’s dangerously P.C. national security policies in 2015 and 2016. His body was found next to a vehicle near Drytown, California.
An investigation is reportedly underway to determine whether his death was a homicide or a suicide.
According to Law Enforcement Today, Haney’s friends said that they spoke with Haney earlier this week and he’d “never been happier.”
Close friends of Haney told the police news site that his wife lost her battle with cancer in 2019 and he was engaged to be married later this year.
Haney rose to national prominence in late December 2015 when he made a series of accusations about the Obama Administration’s reckless, soft-on terrorism policies.
The whistleblower claimed that he could have prevented the December 2, 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino if the government had not shut down a surveillance program he had developed three years earlier.
Haney had worked in the Intelligence Review Unit (IRU), where his job was to investigate individuals with potential links to terrorism. He was looking into global terror networks that were infiltrating radical Islamists into the United States and was making progress to that end, when he said the State Department came in and pulled the plug.
Haney said internal memos showed that his investigation was shut down because he was allegedly engaging in “profiling” of radical Islamist groups.
“The Obama Administration is more concerned with the rights of noncitizens in known Islamist groups, than with the safety and security of the American people,” Haney said in 2015.
The whistleblower went on to reveal two months later in The Hill, that he was ordered to actually scrub records of Muslims with terrorism ties.
Incredibly, then-president Obama threw DHS officials under the bus after the San Bernardino attack, faulting them for failing to “connect the dots.”
Haney wrote: “This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
In June 2016, Haney testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing titled, “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism.”
In his 2016 book, See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, Haney expounded more on how critical law enforcement records were intentionally destroyed during the Obama years.
“The national campaign by the DHS to raise public awareness of terrorism and terrorism-related crime known as If You See Something, Say Something effectively has become If You See Something, Say Nothing,” he wrote.
In January 2017, Haney offered to help President Trump “drain the swamp.”
“I know where the valves are and people like me do,” the Haney told the Daily Caller‘s Ginni Thomas.
The former DHS official said that Trump’s national security team would have to “‘put our hazmat suits on,’ and wade into that toxic muck to dig all the pieces of evidence out of the bottom of the pond.”
Haney also predicted that “the forensics of draining the swamp will yield evidence of decisions and policies made in senior people in the DHS, FBI, CIA, the White House in the last eight years and more.”
In October 2019, Haney warned in an interview with American Truth Project that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamic advocacy group believed to be a front group for Hamas, had saturated three major arenas in the country: the social arena, the political arena, and law enforcement arena.
CAIR has, I use the word saturation, saturated into the three major arenas of our country, and that would be the social arena, in particular, the catalyst in that area is immigration reform. And they’ve attacked and have gone after immigration reform, calling it the Muslim ban. So in that area, they’re very visible. The second one is the political arena, and they’re very active in promoting pro-Islamic causes in whatever arena you want to discuss up to and including the State Department. And the third arena is law enforcement, and they constantly file lawsuits and send threatening letters to local law enforcement, sheriffs, and police that want to have training about the threat and coerce and intimidate them into shutting the programs down. So every one of the major three arenas in our society CAIR is there exerting an inordinate amount of influence on the affairs of our country. And it’s unfortunate because they should have been shut down more than ten years ago.
Just last month, he warned in another interview of a growing jihadist threat in Germany.
“[Islamists] are penetrating right into the heart of Germany, [which] means they are already spread out all over the country,” he said.
Haney’s friends stressed to Law Enforcement Today that there was “absolutely no way he would have taken his own life” and pointed out that he had made many enemies when he blew the whistle on the Obama administration.
American Greatness will provide an update when additional details emerge about Haney’s death.
Update: Amador County Sheriff Martin A. Ryan put out a media release on Twitter late Saturday afternoon stating that Haney had “suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound,” and that the firearm was located next to the vehicle. He later deleted the tweet.
Correction:
An earlier version of this report indicated that Haney died from a gunshot wound to the chest.
While initial reports indicated that Haney had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, no evidence has yet been produced to verify that.