Deep State operatives inside the Department of Homeland Security secretly downloaded surveillance software onto Kristi Noem's phone and laptop, the agency chief revealed Wednesday on the PBD Podcast. The spyware was designed to record her meetings and monitor top political appointees across the department.
Noem said Elon Musk's deputies helped her identify the culprits.
"They 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 surveillance wasn't limited to Noem. Multiple political appointees had their devices compromised. When DHS brought in outside technology experts to audit laptops and phones across the department, the scope of the operation became clear. The department's own internal tech teams had either missed it or weren't looking.
"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."
According to Breitbart, this is what institutional resistance looks like when it stops being theoretical.
The surveillance software wasn't the only discovery. Noem said she recently stumbled onto a hidden SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, tucked away on the DHS headquarters campus. The room contained files that no one in her leadership circle knew existed, staffed by individuals working on what Noem described as "some of these most controversial topics."
The discovery was almost accidental. An employee walked past a door, got curious, and started asking questions. That thread led Noem's team to a facility operating in the shadows of their own building.
"I just found the other day a whole room on this campus that was a secret SCIF secure facility that had files nobody knew existed."
Noem said she has turned the facility and its contents over to attorneys and is working to determine exactly what was happening inside.
Think about that for a moment. The person running DHS, a cabinet-level agency with sweeping authority over immigration, cybersecurity, and national security, did not know about a classified facility operating on her own campus. The people inside that room knew it existed. The people who put them there knew it existed. The person in charge did not.
That's not a bureaucratic oversight. That's a parallel command structure.
For years, the phrase "Deep State" drew eye rolls from the Washington establishment. Career bureaucrats were just doing their jobs. Institutional resistance was just institutional memory. Conservatives who warned about unelected officials undermining elected leadership were treated as conspiracy theorists.
Noem herself acknowledged the gap between what she expected and what she found:
"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 saying that entrenched actors inside her own department deployed surveillance tools against the political leadership installed by a democratically elected president. Not foreign adversaries. Not hackers in a basement overseas. People drawing federal paychecks, using federal infrastructure, to spy on the people voters sent to run the agency.
Noem described an ongoing effort to root out what she characterized as disloyal actors embedded not just at DHS but throughout the federal government.
"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."
Noem also disclosed that she is investigating ties between scientists at national laboratories under DHS jurisdiction and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said her team is examining travel records and work connections between American researchers and the Chinese lab at the center of the COVID-19 origin debate.
"I also have national labs under my jurisdiction, they [have] scientists that participated with that [China-based] Wuhan lab. [We're studying] how they were traveling back and forth between each other, and working on those experiments."
This line of inquiry matters beyond the lab leak question itself. If American scientists under DHS oversight were collaborating with a Chinese government-linked facility, and that collaboration was never properly surfaced to political leadership, it raises the same structural problem the bugged phones do: a bureaucracy that operates independently of the people constitutionally empowered to oversee it.
The attorney review of the secret SCIF is underway. The tech audits have exposed the surveillance tools. The Wuhan travel records are being compiled. Each revelation is a thread, and every thread leads back to the same question: who authorized it?
Not who installed the software. Not who staffed the hidden room. Who decided that the political leadership of a federal agency should be treated as the adversary rather than the authority?
Noem summed it up simply:
"It's been eye-opening."
For the rest of the country, it should be something stronger than that. A government that spies on its own appointed leaders isn't a government that answers to the people who elected them. It's a government that answers to itself.
