The Biden administration has agreed to wind down a controversial intelligence “experts” group, as it faced a lawsuit from a conservative legal nonprofit arguing that it was in violation of federal law.
The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group was announced by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September. The group was a collection of figures from the private sector to provide perspectives on the government’s intelligence and national security efforts.
“The security of the American people depends on our capacity to collect, generate, and disseminate actionable intelligence to our federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, campus, and private sector partners,” Mayorkas said in a statement.
But critics have said that the board was not a neutral body and was instead a partisan body. Critics highlighted former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan as two of the figures they saw as objectionable due to their signing on to a letter questioning the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
America First Legal, which filed the lawsuit, found that of all the political contributions of those named to the group, just 1% went to Republicans, while 98% went to Democrats.
Multiple Republican lawmakers had sent a letter to Mayorkas demanding that the appointments of “known purveyors of disinformation” be withdrawn. AFL, also representing itself and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, sued DHS in November.
The lawsuit alleged that the alleged bias violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, citing alleged lack of balance, a lack of public notice and inappropriate influence by the Biden administration.
