Deep State employees inside the Department of Homeland Security secretly installed surveillance software on phones and computers used by top political appointees, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. The spyware captured conversations and recorded meetings, she said, and it took help from Elon Musk's deputies to even detect it.
Noem laid out the allegations on the PBD Podcast on February 26, describing an agency riddled with hostile actors working against the very leadership appointed to run it.
I always believed when people talked about the deep state before that it existed: I never would have dreamed that it was as bad as it is.
The scope of what she described goes beyond garden-variety bureaucratic resistance. This is, if accurate, an internal counterintelligence operation run against the department's own political leadership.
According to Breitbart, Noem said Musk's deputies helped her identify "Deep State allies" who had downloaded software onto her phone and laptop specifically to spy on her and record meetings. The surveillance wasn't limited to her. Multiple political appointees were targeted.
They had done that to several of the politicals, and so we ended up bringing in [outside tech] people … [and we] didn't have those technology experts here in the department looking at all of our laptops and our phones and recognizing that kind of software.
Think about that for a moment. The Department of Homeland Security, the agency charged with protecting the American homeland from threats foreign and domestic, did not have internal tech personnel willing or able to flag surveillance software planted on its own leadership's devices. The fox wasn't just guarding the henhouse. The fox built the henhouse.
Noem had to go outside the department to find people she could trust to sweep her own equipment. That tells you everything about the environment she walked into.
The spyware wasn't the only discovery. Noem said she recently stumbled onto an entire secret Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility on the DHS headquarters campus, a secure room containing classified files that no one in her leadership circle knew existed.
So we just happened to have an employee walk by a door and wonder what it was. Started asking questions. We went there.
Inside, she said, individuals were working with "secret files that nobody knew about on some of these most controversial topics." Noem did not specify what those topics were or who the individuals reported to. She said she turned the materials over to attorneys and is working to determine what exactly the room was being used for.
A secret classified facility inside a federal agency's own headquarters, unknown to the agency's Senate-confirmed leader. That sentence should not be possible in a functioning republic. And yet here we are.
Noem also revealed that she is investigating the movement of scientists between U.S. national laboratories under DHS jurisdiction and the Wuhan lab in China. She said her team is working to reconstruct how those scientists "were traveling back and forth between each other, and working on those experiments."
No specific labs, scientists, or timelines have been disclosed yet. But the mere fact that a Cabinet secretary is actively tracing personnel flows between American government labs and the facility at the center of the COVID-19 origin debate signals that this administration is not content to let the question gather dust. Previous administrations treated the lab leak hypothesis as something between inconvenient and unspeakable. Noem is pulling the thread.
The reflex from Washington's permanent class will be to dismiss all of this. "Deep State" has been mocked as a conspiracy theory for years by the same people who spent four years leaking, slow-walking, and sabotaging the first Trump administration from inside the bureaucracy. The term may be imprecise. The phenomenon it describes is not.
What Noem is describing fits a pattern that anyone paying attention has watched unfold since 2017:
Noem put it plainly:
I'm still every day trying to dig out people who don't love America, not just [those] who work at this department, but also work throughout the federal government.
That is not hyperbole from someone who just discovered spyware on her own phone. It is a status report.
The attorney review of the hidden SCIF files will matter enormously. If those files reveal what they appear to, that career employees maintained a shadow intelligence operation inside DHS headquarters, the implications extend far beyond one agency. Every Cabinet secretary in this administration should be asking the same question Noem's employee asked when they walked past that door: What's behind it?
Noem called the experience "eye-opening." For the rest of us, it should be something closer to clarifying. The resistance to this administration was never just op-eds and leaked memos. It was structural. It was resourced. And it was hiding in plain sight, behind doors nobody thought to open.