(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Last month, an “independent panel” appointed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released its report on the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump—a report underpinned by 58 multi-hour interviews that panel conducted with federal, state and local law enforcement involved in the incident.
After the report was issued, Headline USA filed a Freedom of Information Act request for transcripts of the 58 interviews conducted by the panel. The Senate Homeland Security Committee published some of the transcripts from its own investigation, which can be found here.
However, the DHS says no transcripts exist from the panel. Instead of interview transcripts, the DHS has 58 memorandums of the interviews.
🚨BREAKING🚨The DHS told me today that no interview transcripts exist from its July 13 Trump shooting investigation. Instead, they only have memorandums summarizing the 58 interviews they conducted with Secret Service and other law enforcement.
Outrageous!
Imagine if the… pic.twitter.com/y73WTFUZgY
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) November 21, 2024
“There are NO transcripts at all as part of this Panel,” the DHS’s FOIA division told this publication on Thursday. “The [Independent Review] Panel members wrote up the 58-interview memorandum instead.”
Headline USA asked the DHS to process its FOIA request for the memorandums. This publication will make them public when it receives them. This reporter has also asked whether recordings of the interviews exist.
If no recordings exist, that would mean that the DHS’s full “independent” investigation is lost to history. The panel was headed by a number of deep-state actors, including Obama-era DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and Frances Fragos Townsend, who was Bush’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism.
While the department has offered to provide memorandums of the panel’s interviews, such documents can’t be relied upon to accurately represent what’s said. Indeed, the FBI notoriously doesn’t record its interviews, instead relying on memorandums referred to as “Form 302” reports.
For example, there were “irregular handling and editing” of FBI 302s in the case of Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, according to a 2020 report from RealClearInvestigations.
FBI officials facing investigation have expressed fears about their fellow agents mischaracterizing what they said during interviews.
Former top FBI agent Danny Coulson, who spearheaded the creation of the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, said in his autobiography that he insisted on submitting a sworn affidavit when he was under investigation for his role in the Ruby Ridge massacre in 1992.
“I had seen too many criminal investigations in which FBI agents conducted interviews and then paraphrased their subjects inaccurately because they were unfamiliar with the complicated subject matter or had their own spin on the case already,” Coulson, who was not charged over the Ruby Ridge massacre, wrote in his book, No Heroes.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
