Philip Haney: The Faithful Steward

By The Sharp Edge

As a whistleblower with integrity to pursue the truth amidst persecution, Philip Haney was a faithful steward of a story much bigger than one man.  He found himself in the cross hairs of an international criminal syndicate of Islamic terrorist organizations, Mexican cartels, and a former administration who concealed their gun running, drug trafficking, terrorism, and infiltration of America.

Just eleven days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first Director of the Office of Homeland Security was appointed to safeguard the country against terrorist threats and a year later, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in November of 2002.  By March of 2003, the Department of Homeland Security opened its doors.  As a charter member of the newly formed department, Philip Haney was there to see it all.  He explained that he was brought on board as a Counter Terrorism Specialist “to follow the trail and find the nests,” which is exactly what Philip Haney did. Texas Representative Louie Gohmert described Philip Haney’s service, recalling “He won numerous awards and commendations from his superiors for meticulously compiling information and producing actionable reports that led to the identification of hundreds of terrorists.” However, under the Obama administration, everything changed.  Gohmert went on to explain, “He saw things that were a threat to this country, he said something, and he was severely punished for it, because apparently the Obama administration had some radical Islamic ties that they did not want anybody, including Philip Haney, to expose.”

From The Arizona Mafia To Homeland Security

Meanwhile, in Arizona, Janet Napolitano, was appointed as the U.S. District Attorney of Arizona in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, then went on to serve as Attorney General of Arizona from 1999 to 2003 and later served as Governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009.  By 2009, Janet Napolitano was appointed to the position of Secretary of Homeland Security by Barack Obama, a move that Senator McCain of Arizona cheered.  McCain remarked, “I think she’s highly qualified, and we as citizens of Arizona are very proud to have a border-state governor and someone with her knowledge and expertise serving in this very, very important and vital position,” adding, “I think we all know that we face challenges from Islamic extremism throughout the world, and I believe she will do an outstanding job.”

Another whistleblower by the name of Jeffrey Peterson, who was drawn into a web of what many describe as the Arizona Mafia,  stated in a recent interview with Quite Frankly, “There is some really important stuff that I do know, and that is, I was around…to see Napolitano.  I was directly involved with these people. I was very close with her inner circle…as they got involved with the Mexican PRI political party, as the relationship started unfolding…and I was around them for a few pivotal years…while that relationship was starting.  So I saw a lot of it.  Very, very important things that translate directly into what’s happening today…”  Peterson went on to explain that, “All I know is what I saw…I was there when Napolitano was leaving Arizona and going to D.C. to become Homeland Security Director…I was with her inner circle of friends…When she got the phone call that she was going to do that, they were all excited. Many of them got appointed as agency directors.”  Peterson added, “It started kind of innocuous. It was just all about Arizona – Mexico relations as far I knew and then they just all started getting pulled in more and more by the money.  They were super tempted by the money. They all wanted that easy money that was flowing from Mexico, and that’s how they got into it.” 

Much of the money flow from this relationship between the Arizona Mafia and the PRI, presumably originated from cartels who likely used their PRI connections for drug trafficking operations through Arizona.  The former president affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, Carlos Salinas, who is regarded by many, as one of the most corrupt presidents in Mexican history, reportedly had family connections to drug smuggling and money laundering operations in the United States. Members of the PRI, which maintained political power in Mexico for 70 years until 2000, had direct connections with and received bribes from the Zetas. Court documents from a case in Arizona revealed a link between Hezbollah and Los Zetas drug trafficking and money laundering operations.  Hezbollah is also known to have established a business relationship with the Oficina de Envigado, an offshoot of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.  A 2011 hearing before the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence concluded that Hezbollah created an infrastructure for training, intelligence operations, and sleeper cells in Mexico while aiding the cartels in the construction of tunnels used for drug smuggling and human trafficking across the United States border.  An abundance of evidence has made it clear to Western Intelligence communities that Mexican cartels have, for years, been in league with Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah.

In 2008, the DEA launched a campaign known as Project Cassandra, which compiled a trail of evidence to prove how Hezbollah’s operations expanded from a military and political organization in the Middle East, to a worldwide criminal enterprise.  Project Cassandra investigators had reason to believe that Hezbollah amassed more than $1 billion dollars per year from gun running, drug trafficking, money laundering, and other criminal operations.  Investigators tracked cocaine trafficking and money flow from Mexico to the United States, with direct links to the state sponsor of Hezbollah, Iran, as well as to the inner circle of Hezbollah itself. As Project Cassandra investigators began to zero in on the targets of their investigation, they repeatedly faced roadblocks by the Obama State Department.  All requests by the investigators to prosecute, arrest, or file sanctions against the key players in this massive international trafficking operation, were systematically rejected.  Despite all of the evidence, in 2010, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, John Brennan, told a Washington conference that the Obama administration was seeking ways to “build up the more moderate elements,” of Hezbollah.

Between 2009 and 2011, an operation known as “Fast and Furious,” involved repeated transports of weapons and military equipment south of the border to the Sinaloa cartel.  A contributor for The Hill recounted, “M-16s, AR-15s, AK-47s, 1911 Colt 45s, grenade launchers, grenades, Kevlar vests and Night Vision Goggles (NVGs) were reported to the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General in 2012 as having been a part of weapons and equipment ran across the border as part of Fast and Furious.”  In a minimum of three separate occasions, weapons were transported through Arizona to Mexico, where the transporters met with, both, a U.S. national and a person of Middle Eastern descent to receive the load.  Guns transported through the Fast and Furious operation have been connected to the death of Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona, and may potentially link to the Paris terrorist attacks and a Garland, Texas attack, both in 2015, Judicial Watch reported, noting that “The government lost track of most of the weapons,” making it difficult for weapons to be traced to specific attacks.  However, in 2010, Fast and Furious-linked weapons were, in fact, traced and intercepted by a Moroccan Commander on their way to arm rebels in Algeria. With Hezbollah’s growing presence in Mexico while Operation Fast and Furious was in full swing, many of the untracked weapons may have ended in the hands of these terrorists.  In a 2013 Congressional hearing, Representative Ted Poe remarked, “Do you remember Operation Fast and Furious? We still haven’t gotten answers on that scandal…Of course these guns ended up in the hands of terrorists – narco-terrorists…Is this the new foreign policy of the United States – international weapons trafficking?”

According to a December 2018 complaint filed by whistleblower, Jeffrey Peterson, against members of the Arizona Mafia, Peterson alleges that he personally witnessed an alleged Arizona Mafia member, Dennis Burke, the former chief of staff to Janet Napolitano who was appointed to the position of U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona by President Obama in 2009,  who “made numerous statements, including possible admissions of misconduct and/ or culpability to [the] Plaintiff [Jeffrey Peterson] while Plaintiff [Jeffrey Peterson] and Burke were friends, regarding Burke’s involvement in the Obama-era Fast and Furious arms trafficking scandal.”  Burke resigned from his position in 2011 over leaking sensitive documents to the press, for the purpose of undermining the integrity of an ATF whistleblower on the Fast and Furious operation, John Dodson.

The Mission To Destroy America From Within

Priorities of the U.S. State Department and DHS took a drastic turn in 2008.  Philip Haney described the circulation of a “touchstone document,” known as the Words Matter memo, issued by the Department of Homeland Security, from which a monumental shift in counter terrorism policy arose.  The document marked the launch of a new policy in which the DHS would no longer connect the dots between terrorist organizations and the religious groups from which they were affiliated, as the targeting of these religious groups would violate their civil liberties.  Furthermore, the new policy set off a chain of actions by the department to purge a large database, which Phil Haney had tirelessly compiled.

Another turning point for counter terrorism investigations came in November of 2008, when the largest terrorism trial in the history of the country, known as the Holy Land Foundation trial determined that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) were unindicted co-conspirators in charges against 5 individuals who were found guilty of raising between $12 and $60 million dollars for Hamas.  These individuals and organizations were found to have irrefutable ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. The Holy Land Foundation trial fell on the month of the election of Barack Obama.  Philip Haney remarked, “Instead of acting on this irrefutable evidence, they made the decision, deliberately and intentionally, not to prosecute them [the unindicted co-conspirators], but to turn around and invite them into positions of authority and influence.” Haney explained, “That is one of the reasons why I ended up in such an overtly adversarial relationship with my own government and my own agency, because I had the audacity to have targeted those individuals and those organizations, and put that information into the law enforcement system.”

Senior level members of the Obama administration alleged to have been sympathetic to organizations tied to radical Islamic ideology, included the Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton’s State Department, Huma Abedin, who has Muslim Brotherhood ties and worked as a liaison between Hillary’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation in an alleged pay-to-play scheme that gave foreign countries access to Clinton in exchange for donations to the foundation, and Senior Advisor to President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, who played a key role in orchestrating the Iran deal.  Private meetings were held in 2010 between Muslim Brotherhood front groups, like CAIR, and senior White House officials, including Valerie Jarrett, Janet Napolitano, and Eric Holder, to discuss their concerns regarding civil liberties, counter terrorism strategies, and national security.  Known for taking meticulous notes in short hand during his tenure at the DHS, Philip Haney documented everything, including at least 150 meetings at the White House with Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front organizations such as ISNA and CAIR.

Philip Haney explained the dilemma that the Obama administration faced after taking on this new policy towards front organizations of Islamic extremism, stating, “The problem is that the Counter Terrorism Specialists like myself did our job correctly and the information that we put into the system was actually working.  It was producing law enforcement based actions.  Well that’s not very convenient when you’re bringing those very same individuals into positions of influence and authority in the administration. Something’s got to give.”  Then, just before the failed Christmas day underwear bomber attack, in November of 2009, Haney was ordered  to “delete or modify,” over 800 records of individuals connected to Hamas or Muslim Brotherhood, from the law enforcement database.  A Congressional hearing over the failed bombing attempt ensued.  Haney explained, “While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records.  And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to ‘connect the dots’ in the future—especially before an attack occurs.”

In 2012, Michele Bachmann and four members of Congress, including Louie Gohmert, issued letters to the DNI, the DHS, the DoD, the DoJ, and the State Department with a stern warning regarding the infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. government.  The letter began, “As you may know, information has recently come to light that raises serious questions about Department of State policies and activities that appear to be a result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Given that the U.S. government has established in federal court that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in the United States is ‘destroying the Western civilization from within’ – a practice that Muslim Brothers call ‘civilization jihad’ – we believe that the apparent involvement of those with such ties raises serious security concerns that warrant your urgent attention. ”

Bachmann received harsh criticism over the letters by Arizona Senator John McCain and others.  McCain, himself, met with a known al Qaeda associate and Libyan militia leader in 2011 during a trip to Benghazi, and has been accused by Egyptian media as the “Godfather” of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Egyptian media personality, Ahmed Moussa, remarked following the death of John McCain, “Today was John McCain’s funeral, which the leaders of the criminal Brotherhood in America have taken part in…and they performed the Absentee funeral prayer for John McCain in Qatar, Turkey, USA, and Britain.”  Moussa went on to state, “[McCain] was the main supporter for the terrorist Brotherhood…Senator McCain was the one who opened up the Congress to the Brotherhood. He was the one arranging the meetings and appointments and providing them with protection.”  The warnings by Bachmann and others went largely ignored by the Obama administration, including Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who stated before a Congressional hearing the previous year that the Muslim Brotherhood is an “umbrella term for a variety of movements,” adding that, in Egypt they are a very diverse group that is “largely secular,” and has abstained from violence. 

Philip Haney described a second purge of information from the law enforcement database related to a case on which he worked, referred to as Tablighi Jamaat.  Haney recalled, “The Tablighi Jamaat case was shut down by Hillary Clinton, and the State Department, and my agency, Department of Homeland Security Civil Rights and Civil Liberties…they came to the National Targeting Center in March of 2012 and said they had ‘concerns’ about our focus on this group called Tablighi Jamaat…They shut the case down…This time they didn’t come in and just modify the records like they did in the first great purge of ’09.  This time they came in and took the records completely out of the system.  They bypassed protocol, got my social security to access my records and deleted them.”

Philip Haney Saw Something, Said Something, And Paid The Ultimate Price

Following what Haney described as the “first great purge,” of records in November of 2009, Haney explained, “That wasn’t even enough.  The next step that they took was they went after the individuals who put that information in the system in the first place, and they knocked us off one by one…I was among the first…but I also, by God’s grace, was the one that survived the longest.  I saw it all.” 

During the remaining years of his service for the DHS, Philip Haney was subjected to nine separate investigations designed to intimidate, silence, and ultimately remove him from his position.  In one instance, Philip Haney was falsely accused of leaking information regarding a Saudi person of interest who was injured in the Boston Marathon bombing, which led to the convening of a grand jury investigation against him.  Haney was found innocent.  Meanwhile, lawmakers grilled Janet Napolitano for the intelligence failures in sharing information between agencies that led to the Boston Bombing attack, to which Napolitano admitted that the 2012 return of the Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to the United States, was not flagged, stating, “The system pinged when he was leaving the United States. By the time he returned all investigations had been closed.”  Despite their best efforts to discredit him, Philip Haney persevered through it all, and was exonerated in each of the investigations.

In the final year of his service for the DHS, amidst the trials of yet another investigation, Philip Haney was stripped of his gun and isolated from his colleagues in the department.  Despite the level of disrespect he received from this department from which he served honorably for so many years, Haney did not view this time in solitude as a loss. Instead, he used the period as a sabbatical.  In the remainder of his stint with the department, Haney gathered, organized and archived notes and documents that he had meticulously kept over the years.  On July 31, 2015, Philip Haney retired from DHS and days later, Haney met with WND Editor, Art Moore.  The pair immediately began work on the book, ‘See Something, Say Nothing,’ an expose on Philip Haney’s experience at the DHS, and the former administration’s attempts to obstruct the DHS and other agencies from connecting the dots among terrorist networks.

Haney recalled, “We were writing the book in December.  We were starting to put it together when the San Bernardino shootings happened, and it changed the whole structure of the book, because it sadly proved the whole premise of the book.”  Philip went on to explain, “I knew within a split second it was the case…I yelled at the top of my voice, ‘That’s my case!’”  The shooters in the San Bernardino attack were affiliated with Phil Haney’s Tablighi Jamaat case that Hillary Clinton’s State Department shut down in 2012.  Once again, the departments that were designed to trace the networks of terrorist groups, were unable to make the critical connections necessary to prevent an attack.  Adding to the problem, Philip Haney explained, “Eric Holder’s parting legacy in November of 2014…was guidelines for federal law enforcement officers…We’re not allowed to build cases based on affiliation with any religious group.  So we’re blinded and we’re handcuffed…You can’t build a case to probable cause if you’re not allowed to make an association between the individual and the group, like in his [Syed Farook’s] case, was Tablighi Jamaat.”  Counter Terrorism Specialists were unable to draw connections to Syed Farook’s affiliation with the organization that Philip Haney had tracked three years prior. Haney claimed that the Tablighi Jamaat case, which had been deleted from the law enforcement database, would likely have put into place law enforcement actions against the terrorists, thereby preventing the San Bernardino incident from occurring. 

Then, again, in June of 2016, Haney realized that the Orlando nightclub attack had “chilling parallels” to the San Bernardino attack, as the Orlando shooter was also associated with the Tablighi Jamaat case that he had worked during his time at the DHS.  Haney explained, “[I was] struck by the statement…that there were two cases opened on Mateen in the past, and in both cases, they didn’t find any evidence to charge him, when it took me three or four solid hours of work, but I found the direct link all the way from the Islamic Center of Ft. Pierce, all the way back to my case that I worked on at the National Targeting Center.”  During a 2016 Congressional hearing on Radical Islam and Terrorism, Haney illustrated the administration’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ policy of separating terrorist attacks from their connection to Islamic groups.  He explained, “In the few days after the Orlando shootings, Attorney General Lynch was going to release partial transcripts of the Orlando 911 calls with all references to Islamic terrorism removed.  That is a condensation of what was actually happening behind the scenes with subject matter experts like myself.”

According to Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, Haney had plans to release a new book in the spring of 2020.  Gohmert remarked, “His book was going to name names of people that put this country at risk.”  Representative Gohmert added that Philip Haney intended to return to work for the federal government in the coming weeks and planned to get married in April of 2020.  Haney also stated in one of his last interviews, that he was working with lawmakers on legislative efforts. 

Unfortunately, all of Philip Haney’s plans were stopped short on February 21, 2020.  Philip Haney was found dead next to his vehicle, with a single gunshot wound.  Early reports from the Amador County Sheriff’s department stated the cause of death appeared to be from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  The Amador County Sheriff’s department later released a letter on February 24, 2020, which revised their earlier assessment, stating, “Unfortunately, there was misinformation immediately being put out that we have determined Mr. Haney’s death to be a suicide.  This is not the case.  We are currently in the beginning phase of our investigation and any final determination as to the cause and manner of Mr. Haney’s death would be extremely premature and inappropriate.  No determination will be made until all evidence is examined and analyzed.”  The letter also explained that the Amador County Sheriff’s department requested assistance from the FBI in analyzing documents, a lap top, and phone records found at the scene and in Philip Haney’s RV.  Days later, Glenn Beck reported that he was personally made aware of a thumb drive of important documents that Philip Haney carried on a necklace around his neck.

The death of Philip Haney appears to be yet another attempt to silence him and his message.  As a whistleblower with the integrity to pursue the truth, amidst persecution, Philip Haney found himself in the cross hairs of an international criminal syndicate of Islamic terrorist organizations, Mexican cartels, and a former administration who concealed their gun running, drug trafficking, terrorism, and infiltration of America. Philip Haney knew the dangers he faced in speaking out, but he was a man of faith who felt he was tasked to carry on this mission, stating, “I’m a steward of the story.  It’s not my story.  It’s not about me.  The story is about our country.  It’s a great honor to be a steward of the story, but it also came with a great price.”  Philip Haney paid the ultimate price, in his faithfulness to God and his country.  Despite efforts to silence him, Philip Haney’s message lives on.