There have been untold wrongdoings surrounding Donald Trump’s horrific treatment of immigrants, but this was downright scary. POTUS refused to let the Red Cross, Congress members, and so importantly — journalists onto his kid jail black sites. What exactly does he have in store for the free press?
A whistleblower who resigned from his job as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s spokesperson, James Schwab, was trying to shine some light onto Trump’s disturbing events. All of a sudden, DHS (Department of Homeland Security) agents swooped into the CBS News interview.
Apparently, they only “wanted to talk:”
‘They just said that they wanted to talk to me about the leak with the Oakland mayor.’
CBS’s James Yuccas asked Schwab about Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warning people about an upcoming ICE raid:
‘She was putting your officers’ lives, potentially, in danger?’
The former DHS employee responded:
‘Correct. We ended up arresting 232, which is 16 percent higher than our highest estimates. So internally, that was considered a success….But what they publicly said was that she let people go. According to him, that was not true.’
As part of his job, Schwab helped write a statement for the media:
‘Some of them were able to elude us thanks to the mayor’s irresponsible decision. This is a spin statement. This is what every public affairs officer does.’
Then, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ changed the original message. He blamed the mayor:
‘ICE failed to make 800 arrests.’
Schwab called Sessions’ statement:
‘Completely false…that made me extremely uncomfortable.’
His bosses in D.C. told him to not say anything about Sessions’ statement, just go back to the original statement:
‘After they failed to correct it – it’s a flat-out lie. They know it’s a lie. It was just shocking to me that no one wanted to fix that.’
That was when Schwab resigned:
‘I could not fathom staying at an organization that was OK with lying to the American public. I hate that. In 17 years in the military, at the Department of Defense as a civilian, at NASA, and now at Homeland Security, I have never been asked to lie. I have never been asked to perpetuate a lie, which is the same as lying.’
Yuccas said that he was “completely shocked” when the DHS people showed up during his interview. The agents had nothing to do with the Oakland mayor, so he asked Schwab:
‘Did you ever contact the Oakland mayor’s office?’
The man replied:
‘No. I’ve never met her before. I never contacted Libby Schaaf. Never. I would never tell her. I would never tell anyone…They were very serious. He was very stern with me, and it was concerning.’
Schwab called the interruption an “intimidation” tactic:
‘Why, three months later, are we doing this? This is intimidation. And this is why people won’t come out and speak against the government.
The former DHS employee said that other agencies have experienced the same thing:
‘That’s one of the most important reasons that I’m doing this is that – so that people hear that someone else stood up, that someone else said, “No.” And was concerned with it…To actually prepare and stand out in front of the public and perpetuate something that you know is absolutely false is not okay. And no special agent from the Department of Homeland Security is gonna stop me from saying that.’
Featured Image via Getty Images/John Moore.
