The Hill published May 10, 2024: FIRED! Secret INTELLIGENCE Advisory Panel Disbanded After Stephen Miller Sues. Jessica Burbank and Amber Duke discuss shutting of DHS' intelligence experts panel.
/1🚨EXPLOSIVE DOCS — new docs obtained from our lawsuit against DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) indicate the federal gov’t immediately participated in an effort to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story the same day of the @nypost’s reporting: pic.twitter.com/L9bcuWbu5z
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) October 25, 2023
/1🚨LITIGATION BOMBSHELL — we sued the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the censorship arm of DHS.
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) January 22, 2024
Our lawsuit unearthed new docs showing that the deep state knew the risks of mass mail voting in 2020 but censored these criticisms as “disinformation.”
THREAD: pic.twitter.com/iJ8SNxil82
National Review
written by James Lynch
Monday May 6, 2024
The Biden administration is shutting down a partisan panel of “intelligence experts” that featured multiple signatories of the discredited Hunter Biden laptop letter.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agreed last week to dissolve its “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group” after conservative legal group America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit arguing it was in violation of federal law.
“The Experts Group shall be wound down within thirty (30) days of the entry of the Order, it will not hold any future meetings, and the Department will not reconstitute the Experts Group inconsistent with the FACA or the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The Department will also provide the Experts Group meeting agendas and meeting minutes with participant identifying information redacted within fifteen (15) days of the entry of the Order,” reads a joint notice of stipulation and dismissal filed in Washington, D.C. district court last week. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
AFL’s lawsuit, filed with former Trump official Richard Grenell, accused DHS of violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act because of the expert panel’s partisan imbalance. Congressional Republicans also pushed DHS to disband the panel because of its partisan imbalance.
A whopping 98 percent of the group’s political contributions have gone to Democrats compared to only one percent to Republicans, AFL noted in its lawsuit. The Federal Advisory Committee Act is meant to prevent government agencies from forming advisory panels lacking in objectivity.
Two members of the short-lived panel, former CIA director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, signed the discredited letter by 51 former intelligence officials ahead of the 2020 presidential election claiming the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. Another signatory, former senior CIA official Michael Morell, testified last year the letter was orchestrated by then-Biden campaign senior advisr Tony Blinken.
Federal investigators verified the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in late 2019 by cross-referencing it to his Apple iCloud server, special counsel David Weiss’s team of prosecutors said in a court filing earlier this year. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, an agent who spent years on the Hunter Biden tax case, gave a similar account of how the laptop archive was verified when he testified last year before the House Ways and Means Committee.
“Thanks to the courage of Ric Grenell in standing up to the Deep State, we have just achieved an unqualified legal victory over Mayorkas and Biden. As a result of our lawsuit in federal court, DHS is surrendering in total to our demands,” America First Legal president Stephen Miller said in a statement.
“We won. We beat Biden and DHS.”
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Fox News
written by Adam Shaw and Andrew Mark Miller
Friday May 3, 2024
FIRST ON FOX: The Biden administration has agreed to wind down a controversial intelligence "experts" group, as it faced a lawsuit from a conservative legal nonprofit arguing that it was in violation of federal law.
The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group was announced by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September. The group was a collection of figures from the private sector to provide perspectives on the government’s intelligence and national security efforts.
"The security of the American people depends on our capacity to collect, generate, and disseminate actionable intelligence to our federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, campus, and private sector partners," Mayorkas said in a statement.
But critics have said that the board was not a neutral body and was instead a partisan body. Critics highlighted former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan as two of the figures they saw as objectionable due to their signing on to a letter questioning the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
America First Legal, which filed the lawsuit, found that of all the political contributions of those named to the group, just 1% went to Republicans, while 98% went to Democrats.
Multiple Republican lawmakers had sent a letter to Mayorkas demanding that the appointments of "known purveyors of disinformation" be withdrawn. AFL, also representing itself and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, sued DHS in November.
The lawsuit alleged that the alleged bias violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, citing alleged lack of balance, a lack of public notice and inappropriate influence by the Biden administration.
According to a joint notice and stipulation of dismissal, DHS "maintains its position that the establishment and operation of the Experts Group did not violate the FACA" but agreed to wind the group down.
"The Experts Group shall be wound down within thirty (30) days of the entry of the Order, it will not hold any future meetings, and the Department will not reconstitute the Experts Group inconsistent with the FACA or the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The Department will also provide the Experts Group meeting agendas and meeting minutes with participant identifying information redacted within fifteen (15) days of the entry of the Order," it said.
AFL in turn agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. DHS also reserves the right to create an advisory committee under the FACA provisions. The conservative plaintiffs hailed the agreement as a win.
"Thanks to the courage of Ric Grenell in standing up to the Deep State, we have just achieved an unqualified legal victory over Mayorkas and Biden," Stephen Miller, President of America First Legal and a former senior Trump White House advisor said in a statement.
"As a result of our lawsuit in federal court, DHS is surrendering in total to our demands: they are closing down their new partisan intelligence board featuring Clapper and Brennan — which would have been used to promote censored, unethical spying, and gross civil rights invasions of political enemies — and they are surrendering their documents, handing them over to our possession. We won. We beat Biden and DHS," he said.
Grenell said that DHS "surrendered" because "they knew the America First Legal team was right, and Biden’s team broke the law."
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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