Philip Haney, a former Homeland Security Department official during the Obama administration who blew the whistle on his own agency, was found dead Friday with a gunshot wound about 40 miles east of Sacramento, California.
The Amador County Sheriff's office confirmed to the Washington Examiner that deputies and detectives responded to reports Friday morning at 10:12 a.m. of a male subject on the ground with a gunshot wound in the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth, California.
"Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound. A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time," the sheriff's office said in a statement.
The Amador County Sheriff's office would not respond to any further questions.
According to sources close to Haney, he was recently in contact with top officials about returning to work for the DHS. Additionally, Haney was engaged to be married.
As a whistleblower, Haney testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2016 that DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files of people with ties to Islamist terrorist groups, arguing several terrorist attacks against people in the United States could have been prevented if certain files had not been scrubbed.
“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,” Haney wrote in an opinion piece for the Hill in February 2016. “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.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/obama-dhs-whistleblower-found-dead-with-gunshot-wound-in-california