Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan was expected to use a press conference Thursday to blame Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its chief, Mark Morgan, for the leak of a nationwide federal immigration operation, three sources familiar with plans for the briefing told the Washington Examiner.
DHS abruptly canceled the briefing five minutes before its scheduled start of 4 p.m. A DHS spokesman told reporters already seated that the department did not want McAleenan’s comments to interfere with Capitol Hill negotiations for supplemental border funding.
But in the hours leading up to the briefing, several officials who were aware of what McAleenan was going to discuss said it would include the shuttered ICE operation.
“He’s not going to come out and say, ‘Mark Morgan is at fault,’ but he’s going to say, ‘People could have figured out what’s going on based on what Mark Morgan said,” one person said.
Two senior administration officials said McAleenan was planning to blame the divulging of details about the 10 deportation raids on Morgan’s oversharing information at a media roundtable on June 5, which the Washington Examiner attended with reporters from approximately 10 other outlets.
One current official said if the information had been shared or even hinted at in a way that reporters could have dug into it, the stories would have been out the following day, not 16 days later, when the Washington Post reported details on the ICE operation.
But the three officials, all of whom have previously named McAleenan as the mastermind behind the leak, also pointed to holes in McAleenan’s talking points for the press conference Thursday afternoon.
“What they can’t explain — the reporter specifically said DHS sources gave him this info,” one person said.
