DOJ's report of domestic terrorism full of flaws and lies, says lawsuit

Department of Justice Secretary Jeff Sessions

ASAM NEWS

TWO CIVIL RIGHTS groups are suing the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security for issuing what it called a “misleading, biased and harmful” government report asserting that foreign-born individuals make up 73 percent of individuals convicted of international terrorism.

The complaint, filed April 9 by the Oakland-based Muslim Advocates and Democracy Forward asserts that the Trump Administration distorts the facts “to fabricate a threat posed by immigrants,” especially Muslims.

“The Trump administration’s relentless persecution of immigrants, minorities, and American Muslims has taken many outlandish, unconstitutional, and unlawful forms over the past year and a half. This so-called report is blatantly false, purposefully misleading, and it’s illegal,” said Johnathan Smith, legal director of Muslim Advocates. “The government has an obligation to be truthful and transparent, and we plan to hold this administration to that standard.”

The groups charge that the report violates a law designed to ensure the quality of data-the Information Quality Act or IQA. They says the report “flagrantly violates” requirements under the act.

The lawsuit says the 73 percent figure used by DOJ and DHS is based on “unreliable methodology and misleading presentation” of the data.

A government source told the Daily Beast that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions took charge of the data and sent it to DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen. The methodology used to collect the data was designed to achieve desired results.

The Justice Department called the Daily Beast story “categorically false.”

“For those of us who were actually involved, this story is as bizarre as it is fictional,” Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores said.

One former FBI agent backed up the Daily Beast story.

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, told Vice that the report is misleading on many levels.

For instance, Sessions said, “We currently have terrorism-related investigations against thousands of people in the United States, including hundreds of people who came here as refugees.”

“The numbers of investigations are always vastly more than the number of indictments,” said Greenberg. “You can’t say because someone is investigated that they’re guilty.” The FBI investigates 7,000 to 10,000 international terror cases in any given year, and in fiscal year 2017, for perspective, there were 44 convictions.

Much of the language in the 11-page report and the accompanying press release is vague, says Greenberg. For example, the release states that “in 2017 alone DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watch list traveling to the United States.” But neither the release or report say how those encounters ended.

“This kind of bureaucratic manipulation of what should be objective, professional analysis is what undermines confidence in these institutions,” said Michael German, a former FBI special agent now with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

The flawed report, released in January, is behing used for the justification of the Muslim travel ban instituted by Donald Trump and some of questionable policies of ICE and and law enforcement.

(Views From the Edge contributed to this report.)

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