Most Americans’ knowledge of Philip Haney, if they have any at all, comes from the obituary/eulogy type commentary that has followed the news stories of his death by gunshot last week.  The generic MSM commentaries don’t do the man justice; the image they portray is that of a sort of forgettable, bookish-looking bureaucrat who clashed with the Obama administration and ultimately was run out of his post at the Department of Homeland Security.  The ‘approved’ ruling class conclusion:  no big deal; happens all the time as part of Beltway political intrigue; barely even a footnote or asterisk in the history of the times. 

Not so. 

Philip Haney testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee June 28, 2016

Screen shot from Fox News

Philip Haney was a personal acquaintance, not a long-time friend.  But even as just a personal acquaintance, he quickly conveyed that he epitomized the ideal of a public servant:  he was not a political partisan; he was first and foremost an American patriot, determined as a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security to do his best to protect all of the American people.  And he committed to do so at the critical post-9/11 time in American history.

With his academic background, skills, talents and devotion, Haney quickly developed the expertise that enabled him to start connecting dots with regard to the Islamic threat inside and outside America.  But when he attempted to do his job as a public servant, sound the alarm responsibly, and call for action by the US government to address the threat, he ran up against the Obama administration’s ideological sympathy with Islam (transparently evident in the Islamic apology tour that began Obama’s Presidency; the Benghazi-was-caused-by-an-anti-Muslim-video lie; ‘the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet’ speech to the UN; and the ‘Iranian nuclear deal’).  

Haney’s refusal to ‘stand down’ and go quietly in the face of one of the most serious threats facing America in the 21^st century represents the heroics that make him deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Haney’s conflict was not the petty turf-war of a Deep State bureaucrat determined to control and direct US foreign policy in a Ukrainian cesspool of Deep State/ruling class corruption (Lt. Col. Vindman?).  Haney knew first hand of explicit threats to the national security of the American homeland, and encountered an American President determined to deny the threat and prevent remedial action.

For all President Trump has done about the Islamic threat — most recently with (1) a peace plan that for once in the history of American presidential initiatives in the Middle East effectively identifies and isolates the Islamic jihadist mentality of ‘Palestinian’ leadership as the core obstacle to peace with ‘the Jews’, and (2) a reinstatement of Islamist expert Raymond Ibrahim to speak to the Army War College — a posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Philip Haney would  powerfully signal to Islamists inside and outside America that the Trump administration is newly awake and alert to the threat, and truly represents a new sheriff in town when it comes to dealing with it.

Back to Mr. Haney…watching him genuinely tear up as he described a conversation with his wife about his dawning recognition that the Obama administration not only would not act to protect Americans from this real threat but would act aggressively to hide or otherwise remove evidence of it was truly stirring.  Here was a man with a straightforward love for his country, and a clear, informed understanding of the nature of the Islamic threat and the ways in which it conflicts with the American culture of freedom and the American rule of law. He was astonished, baffled and ultimately despairing at the reaction of the Obama regime—which was in the midst of doing everything short of murder to destroy Haney’s professional reputation and run him out of government.  He did not have the role of soldier in the military, but he stood as a warrior for preserving American freedom.

Read Haney’s book “See Something, Say Nothing” to get a fuller picture of what he encountered and endured.  Few of us can imagine what it is like to be on the receiving end of a US government-sanctioned campaign of harassment, intimidation and character assassination (Lt. Gen. Flynn?).  Ask yourself how any American administration could take the actions Obama’s did toward Haney, and you will not come away with a comfortable feeling.  Because it is one thing for Obama to have Islamic sympathies from personally growing up in Islamic schools—from which it might be reasonable to expect Obama to want extra caution exercised by his DHS before identifying Islamic threats to America as Islamic threats to America.  But it is quite another for Obama officials to zero in on Philip Haney and his documented, rational findings—and take action to destroy him rather than action to address the very real threats he identified.

Americans are only now slowly coming to grips with the magnitude of the damage to America caused by eight years of President Barack Obama and his carefully managed and disguised radical leftist ideology.  President Trump has long understood it at least at a gut level, and is working more intensively every day to repair the damage.  But to date, the Obama-directed politicization and weaponization of the enormous power of the federal government against a political opponent—in the person of Donald Trump—is getting most of the attention.

American patriots are holding out hope that AG Barr and John Durham will out the truth and impose accountability on the perpetrators of that piece of the Obama legacy.  But the story of Philip Haney lies at the center of another piece of that legacy that deserves just as much attention, and just as urgently.

Awarding the Medal of Freedom to Philip Haney would be richly deserved by Haney, and a clarion signal that attention is now being paid to the need to protect America from Islamization and the ideology of sharia supremacy.

Eric Georgatos is a former corporate lawyer who operated the Brushfires of Freedom blog from 2008-2016 (a book of top postings from the blog is available at America, Can We Talk?).