Islamophobic Conspiracy Theorist Helped Produce Infamous Trump Report Linking Immigration to Terror

The involvement of Frank Wuco, who has role-played as a fake jihadist, helps explain the controversial report.

Frank Wuco, now a senior arms control adviser at the State Department, dressed as his jihadist alter-ego Fuad Wasul.Internet Archive

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Trump administration has made Frank Wuco, a conspiracy theorist who suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan, a senior State Department adviser on arms control issues. Now, emails obtained by Mother Jones reveal another perverse twist in Wuco’s work for the administration: Wuco, who has a long history of Islamophobic remarks and a habit of role-playing as a jihadist, was one of two Department of Homeland Security officials tasked with coordinating a now-infamous 2018 report linking immigration and terrorismā€”a report so filled with errors and anti-Muslim bias that it’s the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.

In early 2018, as part of the second travel ban targeting mostly majority-Muslim countries, President Donald Trump asked DHS and Department of Justice to prepare a report on terrorist activity by foreign nationals. Emails received through a public records request show that Wuco was one of two DHS officials managing the department’s effort to fulfill Trump’s request. When DHS and DOJ jointly released the terrorism report in January 2018, it was so misleading that watchdog groups took the rare step of suing the Trump administration for violating a law designed to prevent the government from providing false information to the public.

Before joining the Trump administration in 2017, Wuco portrayed Islam as a fundamentally violent religion whose adherents were determined to conquer the West. He had a radio show with a recurring feature called “Ask the Jihadist,” in which he pretended to be a terrorist named “Fuad Wasul” and adopted a fake accent. In a video promoting the character, Wuco wore a keffiyeh and railed against ā€œAmericans devils,ā€ shouting in broken English, “We’re make jihad for Allah!” On his radio show, Wucoā€”as himselfā€”said he wanted to put a bullet ā€œright betweenā€ Wasul’s eyes. 

In 2017, I reported that Wuco was in charge of implementing actions required by Trump’s executive orders for DHS. The newly obtained emails, from August and September 2017, show him serving in a project management role on the terrorism report, working with officials from DHS and the Justice Department to prepare the report. In August 2017, Gene Hamilton, then a senior adviser at DHS, wrote in an email that Wuco and another member of the departmentā€™s Executive Order Task Force would ā€œhave the lead on coordinating the DHS responseā€ to the terrorism report. (The second personā€™s name was redacted by DHS, and the department’s press office did not respond to a request to identify the person.) Wuco wrote back to Hamilton that he looked forward to Hamilton’s input on what should be included in the report. Hamilton, now at the Justice Department, is a close ally of Stephen Miller, the White House immigration adviser who promoted white nationalist tropes in emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. After seeing what was described as a near-final version of the report, Wuco wrote, “Fantastic work.” 

The main finding of the 2018 report was that 73 percent of people convicted on charges related to international terrorism were born outside the United States. The administration arrived at such a lopsided figure by excluding acts of domestic terrorism, which are far more likely to be committed by people born in the United States. Trump ignored that distinction, tweeting that the report showed that nearly three in four people convicted of terrorism-related charges were born abroad. Trump tied the report to immigration policy, arguing that it showed that Congress should limit people’s ability to bring relatives to the United States.

Another section of the report stated that ā€œaliensā€ were convicted of 69,929 sex offenses between 2003 and 2009. In fact, that number referred to arrests, not convictions, and to the period between 1955 and 2010ā€”a timespan nearly 10 times longer than the report suggested. The report also relied on an unpublished study to suggest that about 25 honor killings occur in the United States each year, failing to note that the author of the study had admitted that his methodology was ā€œnot terribly scientific.ā€ The eight ā€œillustrative examplesā€ of terrorism included in the report all featured people who appeared to be Muslim.

In an unusual move, the nonprofit groups Democracy Forward and Muslim Advocates asked the Trump administration to retract the report on the grounds that it violated the Information Quality Act, an obscure statute that directs the government to provide accurate and unbiased information. In February 2018, the watchdog group Protect Democracy, along with the Brennan Center for Justice and individual experts, submitted a similar petition before suing the government to force a retraction or corrections.

In December 2018, the Justice Department refused to do so. Michael Allen, a deputy assistant attorney general, called the hugely inflated number of sex offenses a ā€œmere editorialā€ error that the Information Quality Act does not require the government to correct. In a rare concession, Allen acknowledged that the report “could be criticized by some readers, consistent with some of the concerns presentedā€ by Protect Democracy. The Justice Department, he added, “can strive to minimize the potential for misinterpretationā€ in future reports.

On Wednesday, Massachusetts district court judge Douglas Woodlock heard the governmentā€™s motion to dismiss Protect Democracyā€™s lawsuit. Woodlock appeared skeptical that the Information Quality Act allows judges to force the executive branch to correct informational errors. (In September, a federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward and Muslim Advocates.)

In his past life as a radio personality, Wuco promoted a number of conspiracy theories, ranging from birtherism to the idea that John Brennan, who led the CIA during the Barack Obama administration, had converted to Islam. His blog, which featured a joke about a terrorist ā€œpickinā€™ up hoā€™s,” was jarringly sophomoric for a Navy veteran who fashioned himself as an expert in military intelligenceā€”a reputation he often undermined. In 2011, after a right-wing terrorist killed 77 people in Norway, Wuco admitted that he mistakenly assumed the shooter was Muslim. The next year, Wuco falsely insinuated that a Muslim was responsible for the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. 

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Wuco has been at his new arms control job at the State Department since at least August. The State Department has not responded to multiple requests to explain what Wuco is doing as a senior adviser at its Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, which, among other responsibilities, oversees the country’s Nuclear Risk Reduction Center. 

As a private citizen, Wuco suggested in 2016 that the United States should have dropped nuclear weapons on Afghanistan the day after 9/11. He also delighted in the deaths of enemy combatants, writing in 2010 after dozens of members of the Taliban were killed: “This ladies and gentlemen is what we call…a WARGASM! It is that feeling of ecstasy that courses through the veins and nervous system of every red-blooded, patriotic American when our fighting forces rain down death and destruction upon our enemies.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate