The White House rejected a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report that stated immigrants from the seven countries identified for a travel ban aren’t a special risk for terrorism.
The Wall Street Journal reported the White House reviewed the report but believed it wasn’t done well enough and was too political. The report stated “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”
The administration stated the assessment didn’t have enough information and was not the report requested by President Trump on the seven countries.
“The president asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for,” a senior administration official told the Journal.
A White House spokesman said they were looking for a report “driven by data and intelligence, and not politics.”
That statement echoes a frequent critique from Trump officials. They believe holdovers from the Obama administration are responsible for information that doesn’t back up Trump’s stated policy goals.
However, the Department of Homeland Security said through a spokeswoman that politics was not the main reason for the report’s rejection.
“It is clear on its face that it is an incomplete product that fails to find evidence of terrorism by simply refusing to look at all the available evidence,” said Gillian Christensen, the department’s acting press secretary.
“Any suggestion by opponents of the president’s policies that senior [homeland security] intelligence officials would politicize this process or a report’s final conclusions is absurd and not factually accurate. The dispute with this product was over sources and quality, not politics,” she added.
The assessment was based on public statistics and reports from the Justice and State Departments. The assessment also used a report on global threats produced by American intelligence agencies every year.
According to the report, foreign-born people who have tried to commit, or did commit, terrorist attacks in the United States during the last six years came from 26 different countries. Of 82 people who either died trying to commit terrorism or were convicted of terrorism charges, more than half were native-born Americans, according to the DHS report.
The report also stated only two of the countries targeted by Trump’s immigration order were among the top countries for foreign-born terrorists, Iraq and Somalia. The other top countries are Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iraq and Uzbekistan.
