Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem is alleging that members of her own department covertly installed spyware on government-issued devices used by Trump administration officials, including her personal phone and laptop, enabling staff to record internal meetings and monitor confidential communications.
Noem outlined the claims during an appearance on the PBD Podcast, asserting that outside technology experts, including Elon Musk and members of his team, helped expose what she described as unauthorized surveillance tools embedded in hardware assigned to political appointees. According to the Daily Caller, Noem said the suspicious software was discovered only after independent specialists examined DHS devices and detected irregular digital activity that raised serious red flags.
Her account went beyond digital surveillance, extending into what she portrayed as a hidden physical infrastructure of secrecy within the departments own campus. I cant believe what I found since Ive been in this department. I just found the other day a whole room on this campus that was a secret skiff secure facility that had files nobody knew existed. So we just happened to have an employee walk by a door and wonder what it was and started asking questions, Noem said. We went in there. There was individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about on some of these most controversial topics like that, and now Ive got that turned over to attorneys, and were getting to the bottom of what exactly happened there.
Pressed for corroborating details, DHS declined to expand on the secretarys explosive assertions, offering only a terse statement. A department spokesperson said, We will let the Secretarys post speak for itself, while Noem reiterated on X that DHS staff had installed surveillance software on devices used by her and other political appointees and that secure rooms containing undisclosed files were subsequently uncovered and handed over to legal counsel.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which could face questions about oversight and accountability if the allegations are substantiated, did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundations request for comment. The silence from DOGE and the limited response from DHS leave significant questions about who authorized the alleged surveillance, how long it was in place, and whether any legal safeguards were bypassed in the process.
Noem also pointed to the vast troves of information held by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), suggesting that the data under her purview reveals troubling patterns from the COVID era and beyond. We have CBP which is Customs and Border Protection. They know every traveler that comes into this country, every good that comes in, theyre the ones who assess and collect all of the tariffs, but the information that they had on travelers that came in during COVID, what are national labs, which I also have national labs under my jurisdiction, Noem added.
She linked those records to sensitive research ties involving U.S. national laboratories and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a subject long dismissed by many on the left as conspiracy theory but increasingly supported by emerging evidence and whistleblower accounts. Theyre scientists that participated with that Wuhan lab, how they were traveling back and forth between each other and working on those experiments. Its been eye-opening, and Ill tell you, Patrick, even from the time I came into this office it was, Elon and his team were extremely helpful to me. They helped me identify that some of my own employees in my department had downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me to record our meetings.
According to Noem, the alleged spying was not limited to her own devices but affected multiple Trump-era political appointees, raising the specter of an entrenched bureaucracy monitoring officials who were supposed to be in charge. They had done that to several of the politicals, and so we ended up bringing in people and that was something that if you didnt have those technology experts here in the department looking at all of our laptops and our phones and recognizing that kind of software it would still be happening today. So one of the things I need to do and continue to do is partner with technology companies and experts to bring them in and help us because many times in government and especially in this department, which was extremely neglected, we were just behind and not up to the standard we should be at. I remember the first four months I couldnt even send a PowerPoint over email from the Department of Homeland Security servers that was longer than six pages long.
Her description underscores a bureaucracy that, in her telling, was both technologically backward and politically weaponized, a combination that conservatives have long warned can erode constitutional governance and accountability. Noem argued that the departments previous security posture was not merely inadequate but actively harmful to national safety and to the authority of duly elected and appointed officials.
So the backwards thinking of protecting our country was extremely detrimental to keeping us safe, and many times the deep state. What I tell people most of the time is I always believed when people talked about the deep state before, that it existed, Noem said. I never would have dreamed that it was as bad as it is.
Her remarks will likely intensify calls from the right for aggressive oversight, internal audits, and potential criminal investigations into what appears to be a culture of unaccountable power within key federal agencies. If Noems allegations are borne out, they would reinforce long-standing conservative concerns that an unelected deep state has been operating beyond public scrutiny, using the tools of government not to protect Americans, but to monitor and undermine those who challenge the prevailing bureaucratic and progressive orthodoxy.
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