Deep State operatives inside the Department of Homeland Security secretly installed surveillance software on Kristi Noem's phone and laptop to spy on her and record her meetings, the DHS chief revealed on the PBD Podcast on February 26.
Noem said the scheme targeted not just her but "several of the politicals," referring to top political appointees brought in to lead the department. It took outside help to even detect it.
"Elon Musk's deputies helped me identify [the Deep State allies who] downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me, to record our meetings."
The agency chief said DHS lacked the internal expertise to conduct the surveillance on its own. The department had to bring in outside tech specialists because its own technology teams either couldn't or wouldn't flag the software running on appointees' devices.
"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 what that means. The people tasked with securing the homeland couldn't secure their own secretary's phone. Or wouldn't.
The spyware wasn't the only discovery. Noem said she recently stumbled onto something even more unsettling: a secret SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, hidden on the DHS headquarters campus. Inside were files that no one in the current leadership knew existed.
It was found by accident. An employee walked past a door, got curious, and started asking questions.
"There was individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about on some of these most controversial topics."
Noem said she has turned the facility and its contents over to attorneys and is working to determine what exactly was being housed there, who authorized it, and why it was kept from the department's political leadership. Breitbart reported.
A secret room staffed by people maintaining secret files on "controversial topics" inside the nation's domestic security apparatus. Found only because someone happened to wonder what was behind a door. The question isn't just what's in those files. It's how many other doors no one has walked past yet.
Noem didn't pretend to be shocked that a permanent bureaucratic class exists inside federal agencies. She's been in politics long enough to know the game. What rattled her was the scale.
"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."
This is a sitting cabinet secretary confirming that entrenched employees inside her own department actively worked to surveil and undermine the political leadership the American people voted for. Not a pundit speculating. Not an anonymous source. The person running the agency, on the record, described what she found when she opened the hood.
Noem said the work of rooting out these actors is ongoing and daily.
"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 line will earn the usual howls from the usual corners. Critics will call it paranoid or authoritarian. But when career employees are installing spyware on the secretary's phone and maintaining hidden intelligence facilities on campus, "digging out" starts to sound less like a metaphor and more like a job description.
Noem also revealed that DHS national labs housed scientists who participated in work with the Wuhan lab in China before the coronavirus pandemic. She said her team is now reconstructing the movement of those scientists between U.S. government facilities and Chinese laboratories.
"I also have national labs under my jurisdiction, they [have] scientists that participated with that [China-based] Wuhan lab."
She described the effort as studying "how they were traveling back and forth between each other, and working on those experiments." She called what she has uncovered across the board "eye-opening."
The American public was told for years that questions about lab involvement in the pandemic's origins were conspiracy theories. Social media companies suppressed the discussion. Intelligence agencies hedged. Now the head of DHS says her own department employed scientists connected to that lab, and she's tracing their movements. The people who demanded everyone stop asking questions may not enjoy the answers.
Noem's disclosures raise questions that demand follow-through:
Attorneys now have the files. The outside tech teams have identified the spyware. What matters is whether accountability follows discovery, or whether the bureaucracy does what it does best: absorb the shock, wait out the news cycle, and outlast the people asking questions.
The deep state's best weapon was never secrecy. It was patience. Noem doesn't seem inclined to give them the time.
