Allegations about how intelligence has been manipulated to fit Trumps rhetoric.

S1: Last week, Shane Harris over at The Washington Post was one of the very first people to get his hands on a brand new Trump administration whistleblower report. Yeah, another one.

S2: Yeah, it is a heck of a report. It’s very dense. It has something around eight separate allegations.

S1: These allegations are about how intelligence has been manipulated over at the Department of Homeland Security, intelligence about immigration, election security, domestic terrorism. But to Shane, it’s not just what the whistleblower is saying that stands out.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as his “very fine people on both sides” comments after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017),

he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, answering:

“I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat.

Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

What was really striking and that I was not prepared for was who was making these allegations. They’re coming from a guy named Brian Murphy, who is until recently was the head of intelligence for the Homeland Security Department and is somebody who is running the office that he says is being subjected to manipulation by the president.

Schiff wrote to DHS last week to request more documents and nearly a dozen transcribed interviews with DHS officials, an effort to investigate a whistleblower complaint from Brian Murphy, the former top DHS intelligence official who claims he was demoted for resisting efforts to politicize intelligence. Among other things, Murphy alleges that intelligence assessments on the threats from Russia and white supremacists were delayed and molded to fit President Donald Trump’s rhetoric.