Noem: ‘Deep state’ in her own department installed spyware on her phone, computer

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday that members of her own department secretly installed spyware on government-issued devices used by Trump administration officials, including her phone and laptop, allowing staffers to record meetings and monitor internal communications.

Noem said on “PBD Podcast” that tech experts, including Elon Musk and members of his team, helped her uncover what she described as unauthorized surveillance software embedded on devices assigned to political appointees. Noem said the discovery came after outside technology specialists examined DHS hardware and flagged suspicious software activity.

“I can’t believe what I found since I’ve been in this department. I just found the other day a whole room on this campus that was a secret [SCIF, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] secure facility that had files nobody knew existed. So we just happened to have an employee walk by a door and wonder what it was and started asking questions,” Noem said. “We went in there. There was individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about on some of these most controversial topics like that, and now I’ve got that turned over to attorneys, and we’re getting to the bottom of what exactly happened there.”

The DHS and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

The secretary said Customs and Border Protection maintains extensive records that she has begun reviewing alongside information from national laboratories under her jurisdiction.

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“We have CBP which is Customs and Border Protection. They know every traveler that comes into this country, every good that comes in, they’re the ones who assess and collect all of the tariffs, but the information that they had on travelers that came in during COVID, what are national labs, which I also have national labs under my jurisdiction,” Noem added.

“They’re scientists that participated with that Wuhan lab, how they were traveling back and forth between each other and working on those experiments. It’s been eye-opening, and I’ll tell you, Patrick, even from the time I came into this office it was, Elon and his team were extremely helpful to me. They helped me identify that some of my own employees in my department had downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me to record our meetings.”

Noem said several political officials had similar surveillance software installed on their government-issued devices and that the activity might have continued without outside intervention.

“They had done that to several of the politicals, and so we ended up bringing in people and that was something that if you 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 it would still be happening today. So one of the things I need to do and continue to do is partner with technology companies and experts to bring them in and help us because many times in government and especially in this department, which was extremely neglected, we were just behind and not up to the standard we should be at. I remember the first four months I couldn’t even send a PowerPoint over email from the Department of Homeland Security servers that was longer than six pages long.”

Noem said the department’s prior approach to security was deeply flawed and that the problem extends beyond DHS.

“So the backwards thinking of protecting our country was extremely detrimental to keeping us safe, and many times the deep state. What I tell people most of the time is I always believed when people talked about the deep state before, that it existed,” Noem said. “I never would have dreamed that it was as bad as it is.”

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