The left-wing legal organization behind Colorado’s decision to remove former President Donald Trump from its Republican primary ballot has a direct link to the Biden administration.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) President and CEO Noah Bookbinder is a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) tasked with giving real-time advice to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS website says. 

CREW brought the Colorado case against Trump and celebrated the Colorado Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling to keep Trump off the state’s GOP primary ballot.

“Our Constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government. It has been an honor to represent the petitioners, and we look forward to ensuring that this vitally important ruling stands,” Bookbinder said in a press release.

Bookbinder is a former trial attorney for the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) public integrity section and former chief counsel for criminal justice for the Senate Judiciary Committee. He repeatedly donated to former President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign during his tenure with the Senate, Federal Elections Commission (FEC) records show.

The DHS appointed Bookbinder and 32 other new members to HSAC in March 2022 ahead of the council’s first meeting under Secretary Mayorkas.

“Together, we will ensure that the Department is best positioned to meet the challenges we confront today, foresee and be ready for the challenges of tomorrow, capitalize on the power of technological innovation, and serve our country by living up to our highest ideals. Our Department is privileged to benefit from the experience, vision, and creativity of these incredibly accomplished individuals,” Mayorkas said in a March 2022 press release.

HSAC has met numerous times and produced reports for Secretary Mayorkas on issues ranging from “disinformation” to supply chains and innovation. Mayorkas convened the council’s fourth in-person meeting in September 2023 and Bookbinder attended the meeting, which focused primarily on artificial intelligence, meeting minutes show.

HSAC met multiple times in summer of 2022 to discuss the preliminary and final versions of the “disinformation” report written by the Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee. One of the preliminary proposals adopted by the council was dissolving the Disinformation Governance Board after widespread criticism of “disinformation” czar Nina Jankowicz and false statements she made online. (RELATED: Biden’s Former ‘Disinfo’ Czar Registers As Foreign Agent)

Bookbinder attended an August 2022 meeting about the final disinformation report and questioned a section on how the DHS can be more transparent with its “disinformation” operations.

READ THE MEETING MINUTES:

“I just had one clarifying question. Clearly, a couple of the issues that are discussed in the report, particularly disinformation around the election and disinformation around COVID, are issues where information and disinformation has become highly politicized. And because of that, I think efforts to correspond to disinformation has been attacked as perhaps political,” Bookbinder said, according to the HSAC meeting minutes.

“It was my sense that the recommendation five under transparency was really intended in part to inoculate the department against accusations that correcting disinformation was political. But I just wanted to clarify if that was a part of the intent of that particular set of recommendations,” he added.

Jamie Gorelick, “disinformation” subcommittee chair responded to Bookbinder by pointing him to the final report’s lengthy appendix full of term definitions and graphics on how to correct supposedly inaccurate information.

The appendix contains a list of insights from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a DHS subdivision central to the department’s efforts to censor speech online ahead of the 2020 election. Then-President Donald Trump was among those targeted by CISA and its third-party affiliates when they pressured social media platforms to censor election-related speech, according to a report by the House Judiciary Committee.

Bookbinder worked on a report produced by the Openness and Transparency DHS Subcommittee report in March 2o23 with recommendations for how DHS can become more transparent without compromising its law enforcement mission.

The report suggests increasing funding for transparency initiatives and using a combination of training and data to make the department more accountable to the public.

Specific policy recommendations in the report address the DHS’ ability to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records requests and additional monitoring of facilities used to detain illegal immigrants.

The southern border reportedly saw a record high of over 12,600 encounters Monday as border patrol agents struggle to process record amounts of border crossings.

DHS and CREW did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

AUTHOR

JAMES LYNCH

Investigative reporter. James Lynch can be reached on Twitter @jameslynch32.

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