The Political Insider

Over the weekend, we reported that Philip Haney, who acted as a whistleblower on Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, had been found dead on the side of the highway in what police initially thought was a suicide. Now, however, police are backtracking their suicide assertion, describing the initial reports as “misinformation.”

Haney was found dead last Friday in a park-and-ride area near Highway 16 and Highway 124 in the city of Plymouth, which is about 40 miles east of Sacramento, according to Daily Mail. The Amador County Sheriff’s Office initially said that the 66 year-old was found dead of a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” but after backtracking, they asked the FBI for assistance.

“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,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “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 sheriff’s office has asked the FBI to specifically help them by analyzing documents, phone records and a laptop that was found at the scene.

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“We are currently in possession of his vehicle, the firearm located at the scene and his RV and we will be requesting evidence processing assistance from the FBI on those items as well,” the sheriff’s office explained.

In the months before his death, Haney had said that he was considering writing a sequel to his bombshell 2016 book about his time working in Obama’s DHS. He had hoped to publish it sometime in the spring so that he could get it out before the election.

Haney made headlines in 2016 when he slammed Obama’s DHS for the way it handled radical jihadists and Islamic extremists. He went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify that in 2009, the DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files that showed links between various people and Islamic terror groups. Haney testified that numerous terrorist attacks would have been avoided had these files not been deleted.

At the time of his testimony, Haney explained this further in a piece for The Hill.

“It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009,” he wrote. “It is demoralizing —and infuriating— that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.”

Prior to his death, Haney was also reportedly in talks with DHS officials to return to the department.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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