"There are indicators throughout this entire case that I saw, professionals within the FBI and the intelligence community saw, that all pointed one way -- we were dealing with an individual who was a member of a foreign intelligence agency that had been working within CIS," Mr. Maxwell said.
"The danger was that he was granting asylum to anybody that he wanted to, with impunity, at a time of his choosing. Who was he letting into this country?" The man was in demand at USCIS because of his language skills. He was able to do interviews without the need for a translator. At the time, that seemed to be a big benefit to the speed of the process, but in retrospect, Mr. Maxwell said, it posed a security risk.Mr. Maxwell said they first became suspicious of the man when, while on a yearlong assignment to the Defense Department in Iraq, he walked outside the Green Zone in Baghdad and disappeared. According to documents, authorities first thought he had been taken hostage but concluded he had left of his own accord. Mr. Maxwell began an investigation that found that the man had been hired by USCIS even though negative "national security information" in his background check caused other federal agencies to pass on him.
A national security polygraph showed repeated deception on his part, and in interviews with Mr. Maxwell, he denied having traveled to Iran, Syria and Jordan while he worked for USCIS, even though electronic databases showed he had made the trips. The man also made "persistent requests" that Mr. Maxwell help him achieve secret or top-secret clearance so he could go back to work for the Defense Department. Mr. Maxwell said that request was weird because Defense would have had to do its own background check anyway.
Nice. Does it strike you that Islamic terrorists never learn how to be subtle and blend in? ("I just want to fly the plane, I don't need to land it.") Does it strike you that they game our system without needing to be subtle?
The suspected agent, whose name has not been released, judged 180 asylum applications while at USCIS, the agency that also rules on green cards, citizenship and employment authorization. A database check during Mr. Maxwell's investigation turned up national-security questions about nearly two dozen of those cases. Mr. Maxwell will also tell the panel about criminal accusations pending against USCIS workers and that top USCIS officials have deceived Congress and obstructed the duties of his office, the agency's internal affairs division.
