Kristi Noem has been gone from the Trump administration for months now, but a new report from The Daily Beast has exposed a "catastrophic" technical flub that the Department of Homeland Security made on her watch, and it could take "years" to undo the damage.
The issue first emerged in April of last year, caused by an "inadvertent" switch to a different internet provider by the Homeland Security Investigations office, the branch of ICE that handles criminal investigations. Because of this change, ICE was unable to use wiretaps to pursue suspected criminals for months, according to "information buried deep in an obscure government document" found by The Daily Beast's sister publication, PunchUp.
"The outage coincided with the number of wiretaps reported by DHS investigators collapsing by more than 80 percent under then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem, 54," the report detailed. "In admitting its mistake, DHS warned that losing wiretap capability for long periods can 'severely cripple' ongoing high-stakes criminal investigations and pose a 'direct, unquantifiable risk' to undercover agents and the public."
The issue might also ripple out from DHS, the report suggested, as the information obtained by PunchUp noted that the HSI office's surveillance systems are used to support investigations across the federal government, including at the FBI and DEA.
Speaking with PunchUp for the story, Eric Balliet, "a former Homeland Security Investigations agent who spent 25 years in federal law enforcement and used between 250 and 300 wiretaps," said he was "astonished" to hear about the error.
"I cannot fathom a federal law enforcement agency not having the capability or capacity to legally intercept communications,” Baillet said. “When you lack the ability to intercept communications — phone calls, messaging apps and texts — the criminal networks win. Fentanyl, cocaine and heroin hit the streets. People are smuggled. People die.”
He added further: "I truly cannot comprehend how a law enforcement agency could drop the ball in such a catastrophic manner... It will take years to recover from something like this. It’s laughable, but in an almost unbelievable way.”
Brandi Young, "a federal prosecutor for 16 years who handled DHS wiretap cases and is now a partner at Texas law firm Keith & Lorfing," told the outlet that a mistake like this could cause high-value cases to "stall" and potentially fall apart "forever." Baillet concurred with that assessment.
"You lose track of who is talking to whom, the devices they are using, their nicknames,” he said. "To not have that function for months is a dereliction of duty, malfeasance of what the American public expects from their law enforcement personnel.”
