Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans

[Karl]

article paste.  i didn't read this whole article, but did notice the
following from the beginning
- it states that journalists usually agree to talk to people, as the
people could be sources
- it describes that a division of the us government arranges meetings
with people by giving them point-to-point in-the-moment anonymous
directions (i've experienced something like this)
- it appears mostly about the government operative himself, who has
been on the news

Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that
investigates Americans
Jana Winter·Investigative Correspondent
Sat, December 11, 2021, 5:00 AM·36 min read

It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking
around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One
message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near
Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then
came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter an unmarked door on
Connecticut Avenue leading to a hidden bar.

The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes
hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the
red velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico, almost
immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a
corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.

“I won’t tell you my name, but I work for the U.S. government,” he
said, according to her account later provided to government
investigators.

It was June 1, 2017, and Watkins was a rising star in the world of
national security journalism, breaking big stories about the
investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. She had
hopped from the Huffington Post to BuzzFeed and then Politico, when a
man writing under the pseudonym Jack Bentley had reached out, wanting
to meet with her. She agreed, as journalists often do, thinking he
might be a potential source.

Ali Watkins, with a newsroom behind her, is shown on a computer screen labeled
Ali Watkins during a PBS interview about her reporting on Russian
espionage, June 1, 2017. (PBS/YouTube)

Once at the bar, however, she found that the man seemed more
interested in gathering information about her than in providing her
with information. And he appeared to know a lot about her, including
details of her travels and her relationship with James Wolfe, an older
man who worked on Capitol Hill.

The meeting, which lasted almost four hours, would change both of
their lives. Late the following year, Wolfe, the onetime boyfriend of
Watkins, was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to the FBI
about his relationship with reporters. And Watkins, by then at the New
York Times, faced ethical questions about her relationship with Wolfe,
even though she denied he had been a source for her stories while they
were involved.

The true mystery of the saga was the role of the man at the bar. He
was portrayed in subsequent articles as something of a rogue actor who
had taken it upon himself to conduct a Trump-era leak investigation,
and he subsequently faced an internal investigation at the Department
of Homeland Security, where he worked.

Yet documents obtained by Yahoo News, including an inspector general
report on the investigation that spans more than 500 pages — and
includes transcripts of interviews that investigators conducted with
those involved, emails and other records — reveal a far more
disturbing story than the targeting of a single journalist. The man,
whose real name is Jeffrey Rambo, worked at a secretive Customs and
Border Protection division. The division, which still operates today,
had few rules and routinely used the country’s most sensitive
databases to obtain the travel records and financial and personal
information of journalists, government officials, congressional
members and their staff, NGO workers and others.


As many as 20 journalists were investigated as part of the division’s
work, which eventually led to referrals for criminal prosecution
against Rambo, his boss and a co-worker. None were charged, however.

Rambo, who believes he was unfairly vilified for seeking out Watkins,
said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Yahoo News that he
acted legally and appropriately. He agreed to speak amid what he
describes as escalating threats against him in San Diego, where he now
lives, and after Yahoo News obtained a copy of the inspector general
investigation into Rambo and his colleagues.

“​​I’m being accused of blackmailing a journalist and trying to sign
her up as an FBI informant, which is what’s being plastered all around
San Diego at the moment because of misinformation reported by the news
media,” he said in the interview.

The story Rambo tells is even stranger than the one already in the
public view, which is strange enough. His meeting with Watkins, he
says, was the result of a Trump-era White House assignment to Customs
and Border Protection to combat forced labor. Rambo, the lead on the
project, was authorized to reach out to anyone who he thought might be
useful, including journalists and other people inside and outside the
government.

As part of that process, he and others he worked with vetted those
potential contacts, pulling email addresses, phone numbers and photos
from passport applications and checking that information through
numerous sensitive government databases, including the terrorism
watchlist.

Jeff Rambo, seen through a window, stands in his coffee shop,
Storymakers Coffee Roasters.
Jeffrey Rambo in his San Diego coffee shop, Storymakers Coffee
Roasters. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)

“There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,” Rambo later
told investigators. “In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100
percent frank there, there's no policy and procedure on vetting.”

Those swept up in the division’s vetting included journalists from
national news organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to the
New York Times. Even Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington
Post, was flagged in those searches.

“When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system
you have access to, that's just status quo, that's what everyone
does,” Rambo told investigators.

But the idea of government officials trawling through government
databases, looking at the private lives — and even romantic
relationships — of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime, is
precisely what civil liberties experts have warned about for years.

“For two decades, we’ve seen how the collect-it-all, share-it-all
philosophy underlying post-9/11 law enforcement floods agencies with
sensitive personal information on millions of Americans,” Hugh
Handeyside, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties
National Security Project, told Yahoo News. “When agencies give their
employees access to this ocean of information, especially without
training or rigorous oversight, the potential for abuse goes through
the roof.”

Rambo, however, doesn’t see his story as one of abuse. He was doing
precisely what his higher-ups authorized him to do.

“I’m called a rogue Border Patrol agent, I’m called a right-hand man
of the Trump administration, I accessed data improperly, I violated
her constitutional rights — all of these things are untrue,” Rambo
told Yahoo News. “All these things are standard practices that — let
me rephrase that. All of the things that led up to my interest in Ali
Watkins were standard practice of what we do and what we did and
probably what’s still done to this day.”


CBP’s National Targeting Center was created in the wake of the 9/11
terrorist attacks to help identify potential threats crossing the
borders of the United States, whether people, drugs or weapons. When
Rambo was detailed to the center in 2017, he was assigned to the newly
launched Counter Network Division, a unit designed as a bridge between
law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community that prided
itself on taking “out of the box” approaches.

Freed from the constraints of bureaucracy, those inside were supposed
to think creatively about how to solve problems. According to
testimony in the inspector general report, Rambo’s supervisor, Dan
White, fostered a freewheeling atmosphere at the division, calling his
team “WOLF,” short for “way out in left field.” White even had a water
bottle with a WOLF sticker. He himself would later tell investigators:
“We are pushing the limits and so there is no norm, there is no
guidelines, we are the ones making the guidelines.”

The division’s assignments were high-level and came directly from the
CBP commissioner, the secretary of Homeland Security or the White
House, which in May 2017 asked the division to look at the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, where the U.S. believed companies were using
cobalt mined by forced labor to produce consumer goods in China.
Rambo, one of few Border Patrol agents assigned to the division, where
he worked alongside representatives from across law enforcement and
intelligence agencies, was asked to lead the project. “My orders were
to tackle a problem set that we were given from the White House,” he
told Yahoo News.


Rambo, according to documents included in the inspector general
report, was told to gather the evidence needed to hit companies with
sanctions under the rarely used Tariff Act of 1930. He proposed using
information from experts in academia, NGOs, humanitarian groups,
officials at other government agencies and journalists specializing in
forced labor reporting. The plan was greenlighted by his boss, he
later told investigators, with one caveat. "Make sure you vet whoever
you contact,” Rambo said White told him.

In late May 2017, Rambo and one of his co-workers began reaching out
to people, including Martha Mendoza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
Associated Press reporter who covered forced labor. On May 31, Rambo,
using his government email, wrote to Mendoza explaining that CBP was
trying to identify companies that were importing goods possibly linked
to forced labor. “We are hoping to connect with subject matter experts
outside of the traditional government circles as your ‘rules of
engagement’ are a bit different than ours,” he wrote Mendoza, “and can
perhaps help in pointing us in the right direction to U.S. companies
that meet such criteria or are suspected of such.”

Associated Press journalist Martha Mendoza. (Khairil Yusof/Flickr)
Associated Press journalist Martha Mendoza. (Khairil Yusof/Flickr)

Another reporter who caught his eye was Ali Watkins. On June 1, he
spotted a Politico story by Watkins on how Russia’s spy games were
heating up inside the United States. Her story, which came at the
height of Trump administration concerns over leaks relating to the
FBI’s Russia investigation, cited a half-dozen anonymous current and
former intelligence officials. “Ali Watkins was, for lack of a better
word, the hot-topic reporter at the time,” Rambo told Yahoo News.

Rambo, who was later pressed repeatedly about why he chose to reach
out to Watkins, a reporter who had never written about forced labor,
said he was looking for prominent journalists with access and buzz. He
told investigators he wanted to identify national security journalists
who could not just tell CBP about forced labor but also publish
stories that would allow him to “overstate” U.S. enforcement
capabilities. Rambo believed these stories inflating U.S. capabilities
would prompt shippers to alter their routes, proving they were
involved in illegal activities.

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll use Ali Watkins,’” he said.

A former senior DHS official told Yahoo News that forced labor was
indeed a concern of CBP.

“Forced labor was a priority of the administration. It’s a priority of
the Senate Finance Committee that oversees U.S. Customs and Border
Protection," the former official added. "It remains a bipartisan
priority both for the anticompetitive aspects and trade perspective,
but more importantly for the humanitarian aspects."

(“Committee staff are not aware of the Counter Network Division
working on forced labor,” Keith Chu, a spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden,
the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told Yahoo
News. The staff were also not aware that Rambo’s leak investigation
was done under the auspices of working on the forced labor issue, he
added.)


Asked about Rambo’s plan, however, the official expressed surprise
that such a thing would be pursued at CBP.

“I can tell you at minimum that is an overexuberant interpretation.
CBP does not conduct psychological ops or misinformation campaigns.
CBP is not a member of the intelligence community. CBP does not have
the authorities to do those kinds of things,” the former senior
official said.

Rambo believed he did have the authority, and he had certainly had his
boss’s approval to contact Watkins. After reading her story, he did
something that most journalists probably don’t expect government
officials to do: He ran Watkins through an assortment of databases.
Those included, among others, CBP’s Automated Targeting System, a tool
that compares travelers against law enforcement and intelligence data;
TECS, which tracks people entering and exiting the country; the
Treasury Department’s FinCEN, used for identifying financial crimes;
and the State Department consular database, which included details of
her passport application.

“When you say vet someone, you vet them. There’s no parameters on what
that means,” Rambo said.

“Vet the reporters you use,” Rambo said his boss told him, “‘vet them
through our systems.’ I vet them no different than I vet a terrorist.”

On his screen was Watkins’s international travel, color-coded blue in
a format similar to an Excel spreadsheet. He saw a flight from Andrews
Air Force Base to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sandwiched between two trips
with the same person, a man more than 30 years her senior named James
Wolfe. Together they traveled to Cancún, London and Spain, according
to the inspector general report.

Recounting his search of Watkins’s travel, Rambo began to reenact what
he saw as his “aha moment.”

“I know what suspicious travel looks like,” he said, recalling the
moment he thought he had stumbled on something big: the mystery male
companion.

“Who is James Wolfe?” he recalled asking himself, mimicking typing
when describing his efforts to identify Watkins’s traveling companion.

James Wolfe leaves the federal courthouse in Washington.
James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Intelligence
Committee, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on June 13,
2018. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Then he queried Watkins’s family members, thinking he might be related
to her. Wolfe, he found, was not a family member but a senior staff
member on Capitol Hill.

“Why is Ali Watkins flying with the head of security for the Senate
Intelligence Committee?” Rambo recalled wondering, excited by his
find.

But he already had a theory, one that would later be denied by
Watkins. Wolfe, he surmised, was giving her information and access in
exchange for a personal relationship with her.

“It’s reasonable for me to believe in exchange for personal trips she
was given access to Guantánamo,” he recounted, unaware that the
Pentagon regularly offers journalists the opportunity to travel to the
U.S. naval base there to report on legal proceedings related to 9/11
detainees.

Rambo then went to his boss. “I say, ‘This person is great in terms of
access, but based on my vetting she may be receiving classified
info,'” he recalled to Yahoo News.

White later told investigators that the division would regularly
conduct checks on journalists to determine their personal connections,
to establish if they were someone CBP could trust.

“Figure it out,” White told Rambo. “If you can use her, use her. If not, don’t.”

That afternoon, Rambo reached out to Watkins using the address
jackbentleyesq at gmail.com, which he later described as an “off network”
account sanctioned by the Counter Network Division. “It wasn’t just
some random alias I created just then to meet her,” he said during an
interview in San Diego, where lives with his two dogs, father-and-son
beagles named Jack and Bentley.

He would later defend using the Gmail account and a fake name, he
said, because he didn't want to provide information on where he worked
unless he deemed her trustworthy. He and his boss even discussed
signing her up as a confidential human source — a highly unusual
proposal for a journalist — so she would be locked into a
confidentiality agreement, though the idea was never pursued.

Rambo and Watkins agreed to meet in Dupont Circle that evening.


As Rambo prepped for his meeting, he reached out to an old FBI
counterterrorism contact, now at the bureau’s headquarters. “Can you
give me a call,” Rambo wrote in an email. “If possible ASAP. I need to
run something by you that I *believe* might be in your swim lane.”

At the bar, Rambo sipped WhistlePig old fashioneds and fired off
questions to Watkins. Could he trust her? Had she ever burned a
source? The questions began to unnerve Watkins, particularly when they
revealed that Rambo appeared to know private details about her life,
like where she had lived in New Jersey for a short period, and where
she traveled. And yet they stayed in the bar for nearly two hours
talking.

Around midnight, as the bar was closing, Rambo paid with a credit
card, and they began walking together up the street toward Kramerbooks
& Afterwords, a popular bookstore and café near Dupont Circle. Inside,
Watkins said, Rambo was holding up books and magazines while talking,
as if to conceal his identity.

At around 1 a.m. the two left Kramerbooks together and walked down the street.

Standing in front of a closed Starbucks, Rambo continued to press
Watkins about her sources. Had she ever had an inappropriate
relationship with a source? Had she ever done anything to compromise
her journalistic integrity?

Watkins said no, but eventually told Rambo what he already suspected:
She was involved with Wolfe, but she denied he was leaking to her.
“I’ve never received information from that person,” she said,
according to her account later.

“Do you know he is married?” Rambo asked, turning the cellphone in his
hand around so Watkins could see.

“This is his wife,” Rambo said, apparently not realizing he was
showing her a photo of Wolfe’s first wife (the two had divorced and
Wolfe had remarried).

Rambo continued to ask about her relationship, and what would happen
to her career if it was made public.

“Are you trying to blackmail me?” Watkins asked him. Rambo denied he was.

The two continued talking outside the Starbucks, with Rambo pressing
her on Wolfe and her confidential sources. Watkins by then felt
“spooked,” she later told investigators.

Rambo never revealed to Watkins where he was employed or his real
name, but she later told investigators he insinuated he was working in
the Washington metro area with the FBI.

“Here’s a tip,” he told her not long before they parted ways around 2
a.m. “Don’t travel together.”


The morning after the meeting, both Watkins and Rambo each set out to
investigate the other.

Rambo emailed his FBI contact again. “Confirmed improper relationship
between a member of the SSCI and the press,” he wrote, using an
abbreviation for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Additional details in person if possible.”

“[Subject of investigation] is the SSCI Director of Security,” he
added in another email an hour later.

That same day, Watkins returned to the Sheppard to get Rambo’s credit
card slip, which had his real name. A quick Google search led to a
story about a Border Patrol agent starting a brewery. She called CBP,
gave his name and asked to be connected. After a brief silence, then a
click, a phone rang. No one picked up. Still, she later told
investigators, she took this as “quasi-confirmation” that Jack Bentley
was Jeffrey Rambo. (Even several years later, Rambo is still furious
at the bar for giving Watkins his credit card receipt. “Who owns that
place? They gave her my personal information,” he fumed.)

Rambo didn’t know that she had identified his real name when, a few
days after their meeting, he discussed with his boss, White, how to
proceed. According to emails included in the inspector general report,
Rambo was ready to hand everything over to the FBI, but his boss
stopped him. White wanted to run Watkins through more DHS databases to
find out if she had any sources inside the department, expanding the
investigation. Rambo’s probe into Watkins and Wolfe also now had a
name, taken from the whiskey he drank at the bar where he met Watkins:
Operation Whistle Pig.

Rambo said Operation Whistle Pig was focused only on whether Wolfe was
providing classified information to Watkins, or anyone else, but it
appeared that a large number of journalists were caught up in the
probe. “After ‘Operation Whistle Pig’ was approved, Rambo identified
15 to 20 national security reporters and conducted CBP records checks
of those reporters,” according to a FBI counterintelligence memo
included in the inspector general report.

Jeffrey Rambo walks along the street in front of a mural in the Barrio
Logan neighborhood of San Diego.
Rambo in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker
for Yahoo News)
While the Justice Department has policies on seeking information from
journalists or news organizations, the rules apply to records that
require a subpoena or warrant, such as phone records, not information
that the government already possesses. Neither the FBI nor the Justice
Department responded to questions about this.

White then introduced Rambo and another member of the team to Charlie
Ratliff, a program analyst in the Counter Network Division. Ratliff
worked on DOMEX, a program that collects information from the contents
of a person’s electronic device when they cross a U.S. border. The
controversial program sweeps up everything from phone contacts and
emails to the contents from encrypted messaging apps and social media.

“We know you do high profile,” White told Ratliff, introducing him to Rambo.

Rambo explained to Ratliff that Watkins and Wolfe were having an
“affair” and that Wolfe may have been leaking classified information
to Watkins. Rambo gave Ratliff what are known as “selectors,” such as
telephone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers.
Ratliff, in turn, ran those selectors through a number of databases,
including the Terrorist Screening Database, a watchlist that has more
than 1 million names and has been widely criticized for errors and
lack of review.

Watkins didn’t have any direct connections in that database, also
known as TSDB, but one of her contacts did: Arianna Huffington, the
founder of the Huffington Post. “Oh….and the Huffington Post owner
was/is a direct contact to a TSDB on 3 phones and 1 email. LoL,”
Ratliff wrote in one email to White.

“It’s impossible for Arianna to comment, as she is completely unclear
what her connection to the watchlist is,” a spokesperson for
Huffington told Yahoo News.

Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, called the database “a due process disaster.”

“The standard for placement on the watchlist is so low, and the
safeguards against errors and misplaced suspicion are so deficient,
that it’s no wonder the watchlist has ballooned to well over a million
people,” he said. “Having a connection to someone on the watchlist is
not remotely suspicious of itself.”

Arianna Huffington at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2020.
Arianna Huffington at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2020. (David
Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
But it wasn’t just journalists being investigated, or “vetted,” in the
parlance of the Counter Network Division. Ratliff, whose email
signature was “In God We Trust. For Everyone Else We Vet,” created a
PDF file later that month that included “several Congressional
referrals,” according to the inspector general report. That PDF was
then sent to CBP’s Analytical Management Systems Control Office, which
is described in congressional testimony as dedicated to finding
anomalies among the agency’s employees “to mitigate any potential
threat to the CBP mission.”

According to White’s later testimony, Ratliff regularly investigated
congressional staffers’ travel captured by CBP to run against the
Terrorist Screening Database. “White stated that when Congressional
‘Staffers’ schedule flights, the numbers they use get captured and
analyzed by CBP,” the inspector general report says. White told the
investigators that Ratliff “does this all the time,” looking at
“inappropriate contacts between people.” At one point in an email,
Ratliff also references sending a PDF package listing several
congressional members linked to people on the Terrorism Screening
Database. It is unclear, based on the inspector general report, which
members were identified.

Rambo then contacted analysts with Deloitte, a government contractor
that had employees working directly for CBP’s Counter Network
Division, who specialized in investigating people using social media
and other open sources of information. “I sent them the link to that
[Russia] article as context as to who Ali Watkins was and basically
told them to move on with that to uncover what they could,” Rambo told
investigators. He identified Watkins as a “primary target” of
Operation Whistle Pig and Wolfe as an “associated target.”

Deloitte did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

The Deloitte team soon sent back a bulletin pinpointing Watkins’s
exact location on dates when they knew she was with Wolfe, like their
trip to Spain. They also noted other geotagged Facebook check-ins
during the time under scrutiny, including domestic travel to three
states. The bulletin included information on her mother and brother
and links to their profiles. Attached to the email were photos taken
from Watkins’s Facebook profile showing her in Spain.

“Gracias,” Rambo replied.

There were conflicting accounts about how many other journalists,
beyond Watkins, who were scrutinized by the Counter Network Division.
White told investigators that in preparation for speaking with the
Associated Press’s Mendoza, she was run through multiple databases,
and “CBP discovered that one of the phone numbers on Mendoza’s phone
was connected with a terrorist.”


In a statement to Yahoo, after being told of the investigation into
one of its reporters, an AP spokesperson, Lauren Easton, blasted CBP.

“The Associated Press demands an immediate explanation from U.S.
Customs and Border Protection as to why journalists including AP
investigative reporter Martha Mendoza were run through databases used
to track terrorists and identified as potential confidential informant
recruits,” Easton told Yahoo News in a statement. “We are deeply
concerned about this apparent abuse of power. This appears to be an
example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs,
which is a violation of the First Amendment.”

According to a memo that Troy Miller, then the head of the National
Targeting Center, provided to investigators, the division reached out
to reporters at the Huffington Post, New York Times, Wall Street
Journal and Associated Press. “These entities were analyzed further to
determine nexus to the information being provided to CBP in order to
validate any future information that would be provided on alleged
forced labor practices,” wrote Miller, who went on to become the
acting CBP commissioner.

According to records included in the inspector general report, such
vetting was standard practice at the division.

“I would just remove journalists from that question, to begin with,”
Rambo later said when asked about the vetting process for journalists.
“Just through day-to-day practice of how we operate, when you're told
to vet somebody, that you vet them through all of those systems.”

A former New York Times reporter confirmed to Yahoo News that they met
with Dan White and others at CBP to discuss trade-based money
laundering, among other issues. “They also pitched me on the labor
abuse work that CBP was doing,” the former Times reporter said.

​​"We are deeply troubled to learn how U.S. Customs and Border
Protection ran this investigation into a journalist's sources,”
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, wrote to Yahoo
News. “As the Attorney General has said clearly, the government needs
to stop using leak investigations as an excuse to interfere with
journalism. It is time for Customs and Border Protection to make
public a full record of what happened in this investigation so this
sort of improper conduct is not repeated."

DHS, the Justice Department and the White House did not respond to
multiple requests for comment, including about the appropriateness of
investigating journalists.

“CBP vetting and investigatory operations, including those conducted
by the Counter Network Division, are strictly governed by
well-established protocols and best practices,” a spokesperson for the
agency said in a written statement to Yahoo News. “The Counter Network
Division within U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) National
Targeting Center (NTC) shares information with key partners, analyze
threats, and enhances the U.S. government’s operational ability to
combat illicit networks, including those associated with terrorists
and transnational criminal organizations.”

“CBP does not investigate individuals without a legitimate and legal
basis to do so,” the spokesperson added. “These investigations support
CBP’s mission to protect our communities.”


Whatever Rambo’s original purpose for vetting Watkins, his focus in
the days after meeting her was on furthering a leak investigation, and
he appeared to view himself as a central player. “[M]y main concern is
that encounters such as these are a large part of the leaks occurring
and building it out could paint a better picture with regards to that
if the dots can all be connected,” he wrote to the FBI on June 5.

And it was jusn’t just Watkins who interested him. When Reality Winner
was arrested for leaking classified information about Russia to the
Intercept that month, Rambo emailed the Deloitte contractors working
with him a link to a news story about her arrest. “First of many,” one
of the Deloitte contractors replied.

Rambo responded with just a photo of Omar Little, an iconic character
from the long-running television series “The Wire” (Little is a
criminal who operates according to a strict moral code). Underneath
the image were the words “Omar Comin Yo,” a reference to his
catchphrase meant to evoke fear and impending death. “As in Ali
Watkins or James Wolfe is next in terms of being arrested for leaking
information,” Wolfe told investigators when asked what he meant with
the reply.

Over the summer, Rambo stayed on the leak investigation, even
requesting another cellphone for his work with the FBI. In mid-July,
he met with two FBI agents at an Au Bon Pain next to the Hoover
building in downtown Washington, D.C., to relay what he knew about
Watkins and Wolfe. He also sent them copies of their travel records
plucked from CBP’s system. “Let me know if you need anything else
specifically and I’ll get it to you ASAP,” Rambo told the FBI agents,
according to an email he sent following the meeting.

“This is all great info. Thanks so much for your help,” one of the
agents replied. “I’ll look over all of this and get a plan moving
forward.”

On July 13, Rambo wrote the Deloitte team with good news. “Just as a
heads up, ‘Whistle Pig’ was accepted as a full-blown case,” he wrote.
“Just got confirmation yesterday so wanted to update you guys so you
knew what became of it.”

While Rambo thought the case was moving forward, one of agents told
him a month later they weren’t pursuing the investigation. In October,
however, Rambo, who was now working for CBP in California, got a call.
“The FBI just launched a media leak investigation unit, and suddenly
they had all the interest in the world,” he recalled to Yahoo News.

He was also asked to sign a Classified National Security Disclosure
Agreement preventing him from discussing his conversation with the FBI
about Watkins and Wolfe, according to the inspector general report.

Finally, nearly a year later after his final conversation with FBI
agents, Rambo’s work seemed to pay off: James Wolfe was indicted, not
for leaking classified information but for lying to FBI agents about
his relationship with reporters, including his travel with Watkins.
(Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment.)

James Wolfe, being filmed by a camera operator, leaves the federal
courthouse in Washington.
Wolfe leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on June 13, 2018.
(Jose Luis Magana/AP)
What should have seemed like good news for Rambo suddenly made him a
lightning rod. On June 12, 2018, just a week after Wolfe was indicted,
the Washington Post published an article about Rambo’s meeting with
Watkins, identifying him by his real name. Rambo, who never realized
she had learned his name, was blindsided.

Rambo, the article reported, had told Watkins that “the administration
was eager to investigate journalists and learn the identity of their
confidential sources to stanch leaks of classified information.”

Rather than a law enforcement officer working hand-in-hand with the
FBI on an investigation, Rambo suddenly found himself painted as a
rogue agent conducting his own leak investigation. “Rambo’s search of
travel records could be a crime if he didn’t have a legitimate reason
to examine that information,” the Post said it had been told by
unnamed officials.

“Rambo was not part of the FBI’s investigation of Wolfe,” the Post
reported, citing an anonymous law enforcement official.

The FBI nondisclosure agreement left Rambo hamstrung: He couldn’t
correct the record or break his silence. “Knowing what I know now, I
never would have signed it,” he said, adding that his lawyer has since
told him it probably isn’t binding.

The FBI declined to comment on any aspect of this story.

White would initially claim to investigators that he wasn’t aware of
Rambo’s meeting with Watkins. But he wrote an email to Ratliff the day
after the article was published saying, “Thanks, now I just have to go
back and recreate Rambo’s date night,” an apparent reference to the
meeting at the Sheppard.

That same day, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector
General launched an investigation into Rambo, who was put on
administrative leave. The probe, conducted jointly with CBP’s Office
of Professional Responsibility, focused on whether Rambo improperly
accessed government databases to get information on Watkins and Wolfe
without a need to know, and if he’d used that information to question
Watkins about possible leaks of classified information outside the
scope of his official duties.

Over the next two years, investigators interviewed Rambo, his
supervisors, his co-workers and even Watkins. They also reviewed
thousands of emails and records related to Rambo’s investigation into
Watkins and Wolfe and his interactions with the FBI.

Jeffrey Rambo stands against a wall in the Barrio Logan neighborhood
of San Diego.
Rambo in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker
for Yahoo News)
The inspector general’s report found grounds for potential criminal
charges against Rambo, including improperly accessing records, making
false statements and conspiracy. White, who appeared to have lied
about several aspects of his role in the Watkins probe, was referred
to prosecutors for possible charges of conspiracy and making false
statements, the latter being the same charge that sent Wolfe to
prison. Ratliff, who helped Rambo with the searches, also faced
potential charges.

White did not respond to a detailed request for comment. Yahoo News
made multiple attempts to reach Ratliff, who it appears no longer
works at CBP.

On Oct. 22, 2020, the Office of Inspector General presented the
criminal referrals to Mark Lytle, the head of financial crimes at
United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
In January, Lytle replied that it was declining to prosecute, based on
several factors, including legal precedent on law enforcement use of
databases and “the lack of CBP policies and procedures concerning
Rambo’s duties.”

A spokesperson for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to
comment. Lytle, who has since left the office, did not respond to
requests for comment.

That doesn’t surprise Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law
professor and constitutional law expert who has reviewed surveillance
programs. When the government wants to investigate someone for doing
something illegal or inappropriate, it has free rein so long as it
doesn’t violate any specific law. “If there is no law or policy that
specifically regulates it, then there’s nothing that prohibits it,” he
said.


But Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, says these very lack of procedures
are the heart of the problem: “We’re in a very dangerous place if
having no rules means officers can’t break any rules.”

Beyond the legal precedent, there was another reason prosecutors
didn’t want to charge Rambo. “Chief Lytle also stated that it would
not be very good jury appeal as Rambo’s actions revealed potential
criminal violations by Wolfe, Rambo reported the information to the
FBI, and Wolfe was later indicted,” the inspector general report
states.

In response to questions about the results of its investigation, a
spokesperson for the Office of Inspector General replied: “To maintain
independence in appearance and fact, DHS OIG does not participate in
DHS operational or programmatic decisions.”

Chu, the Wyden spokesperson, said the senator was only aware of the
inspector general’s investigation from news reports. “The [Department
of Homeland Security inspector general] was asked repeatedly for the
results of its investigation, but never provided it,” he said.

Watkins, who still works as a reporter at the New York Times,
expressed outrage over the new revelations about the investigation
into her and Wolfe’s relationship. “I’m deeply troubled at the lengths
CBP and DHS personnel apparently went to try and identify journalistic
sources and dig into my personal life,” she told Yahoo News. “It was
chilling then, and it remains chilling now.”

While acknowledging that her prior relationship with Wolfe was
problematic for her reporting, she said that was no excuse for the
government’s conduct. “My mistakes — none of which should have
concerned Jeffrey Rambo or the CBP — have been more than clearly
established in various records, including my employer’s,” she added.
“Those mistakes were mine, not my family’s, and that their privacy was
violated in this process is egregious.”

The same month that prosecutors told the inspector general they would
not be pursuing charges, Rambo was taken off administrative leave and
cleared to return to work as a Border Patrol agent. It wasn’t public
vindication, but at least he had his job back.


Earlier this year, Jeffrey Rambo opened a small coffee shop in the
Barrio Logan section of San Diego, home to a tight-knit Latino
community. He says its name, Storymakers Coffee Roasters, is a tribute
to the coffee producers the shop features. He’s also back in the field
working as a Border Patrol agent, but he runs the coffee shop in his
free time. He describes coffee roasting as his passion.

One of the keepsakes he has from his time in the Washington area is a
large glass globe with cobalt blue oceans and clear land, an award
from CBP for his work that came with a cash bonus. The globe is a
reminder that, before the press coverage, he was lauded for his work
at the National Targeting Center, including on the Watkins/Wolfe case.
The plaque on the globe reads: “Jeffrey Rambo — In Honor and
Recognition of Your Dedication to the National Targeting Center
Counter Network Division in 2017.” At his going-away party, his boss
even cited his work on the leak investigation, Rambo told
investigators.

He still has his job at CBP, but not the accolades. And it hasn’t been
easy going at his coffee shop either. In late September, he arrived
one morning and found a photo of himself plastered to a telephone pole
outside, identifying him as a Border Patrol agent. It called him a
racist who tried to blackmail a journalist. Some posters had a QR code
that linked to a list of articles about Rambo. The posters were also
plastered around the neighborhood, which he blames on the press
coverage of his role in the Wolfe investigation.

A poster on a telephone pole, reading
A poster identifying Rambo as a CBP agent on a telephone pole in
Barrio Logan; a portion of a poster that has been ripped down. (Jana
Winter/Yahoo News)
More than four years after he met with Watkins, Rambo agreed to sit
down with a Yahoo News journalist at a cocktail bar in San Diego to
tell his story. He agreed to speak, he said, because of the threats to
him and his shop. He also wants people to know he’s been cleared by
CBP — something the agency has authorized him to disclose — and is
hoping to offset the bad news stories.

He’s angry at lots of people. At the press for vilifying him, and CBP
for not publicly defending him, and the FBI for its “poor handling” of
the case. “They never would have had a case pertaining to Ali Watkins
or James Wolfe or any other people that may or may not be involved in
this matter if that information wasn’t provided to them by me,” he
says.

The news stories follow him everywhere. Recently, he had a date
planned with a woman, but she canceled after reading articles about
him. In the meantime, Dan White, Rambo’s onetime boss, is back at the
Counter Network Division, supervising the same team as before. When
the inspector general requested any new policies or procedures the
division had for contacts with journalists and people outside
government, it received no reply.

Rambo is convinced the whole story will clear him.


Sitting with a Yahoo News reporter at the bar, not far from his coffee
shop, Rambo was sipping his WhistlePig old fashioned, talking about
the most recent threats, when two women sitting across the bar
recognized him from the fliers around Barrio Logan, the ones that
called him a “fed” and “a rat,” and said he tried to blackmail a
journalist and make her an FBI informant.

"How did you not see this would be a problem?" said one of the women,
referring to his opening a coffee shop in Barrio Logan.

As with everyone else, Rambo was convinced that if he told them his
side of the story, he could win them over.

“Ask me anything,” he said, buying their next round of drinks.

For two hours, until the bar closed, Rambo spoke to the women about
his job and his presence in Barrio Logan.

“Jeffrey Rambo the coffee shop owner is different than Jeffrey Rambo,
Border Patrol agent,” he told them. “That’s just my day job.”

Jeff Rambo stands in his coffee shop, Storymakers Coffee Roasters.
Rambo in his coffee shop on Nov. 21. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
Yet a few hours later, after the bar closed, Jeffrey Rambo, whether a
border agent or coffee shop owner, was tearing down posters of himself
around his neighborhood in San Diego. He wanted CBP and the police to
come take fingerprints, to identify who put up the posters (they
declined). “CBP said this is a private matter, but that’s bullshit,”
he said. “In this neighborhood, being identified as law enforcement is
dangerous.”

The man who investigated a journalist and her sources now feels
wronged by the media, which investigated him, and frustrated that he
can’t marshal the resources of the government to investigate his
critics.

Rambo knows that speaking to a journalist about his case will likely
get him fired from his government job, but CBP’s refusal to defend him
has led him, as he put it, “to take matters into my own hands.”

“What none of these articles identify me as, is a law enforcement
officer who was cleared of wrongdoing, who actually had a true purpose
to be doing what I was doing,” he said, “and CBP refuses to
acknowledge that, refuses to admit that, refuses to make that wrong
right.”