Retired CIA operations officer Sam Faddis has more information on the two men who apparently fooled at least four Secret Service agents — one of whom had been on the First Lady’s security detail — into believing they were working for the Department of Homeland Security.

(Incidentally, it was Faddis who also reported the discovery of Hunter Biden having Defense Department encryption keys on his laptop, “which,” he tweeted, “may have allowed him to create fake email accounts and run his [communications] through DOD servers. Slick. And very, very illegal.”)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled story.

An 18-Month Ruse

Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Sher-Ali, 35, were arrested last Wednesday at a luxury apartment complex called Crossing in the high-end Navy Yard neighborhood of southeast Washington D.C. and charged with impersonating DHS officials. They had told the Secret Service agents that they were investigating events related to January 6, and they managed to fool them for at least 18 months, plying them with extravagant gifts.

According to Faddis, the management at the apartment complex bought the line that they were government agents and had allowed them to live there rent-free. Amazingly, the two men had even wangled access to apartment surveillance cameras and access codes to all doors. From all appearances, they were surveilling residents of the building. As we reported last week, the raid on their apartment turned up quite a collection of weapons, as well as a binder that contained a list of all the residents in the building.

Who Were These Guys?

Regarding that, we have more information concerning what we wondered most about when the story broke: the names on that list. Not surprisingly, residents include federal agents (real ones), individuals who worked at the White House, and congressional aides and advisers. So, who were these guys there to spy on?

Sher-Ali claimed to be a Pakistani intelligence officer and held visas for both Pakistan and Iran. Taherzadeh, who may be an American citizen, reportedly told investigators he didn’t know the source of their funding and that Sher-Ali was paying for everything. In the months before impersonating a DHS agent, Sher-Ali had traveled to Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Qatar, including multiple stopovers in Doha.

The men used fake websites, and, as we reported last week, recruited at least one man to be “trained” as an agent. How the Secret Service agents were taken in will be another matter for investigation; they are all on leave and “are restricted from accessing Secret Service facilities, equipment and systems,” according to a Secret Service statement. In their defense, the imposters did make it look good; they reportedly carried the kind of handguns used by U.S. law enforcement, drove official-looking black SUVs with emergency lights, and — big heads up, folks — demonstrated to them that they had secure access to what appeared to be DHS computer systems.

The charge of impersonating a government officer could be expanded to include conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

There’s More to the Story

To quote Faddis: “It is too early to determine what all of this means, but the arrests come against the backdrop of repeated Iranian threats to assassinate former President Donald Trump and numerous other American officials,” particularly Mike Pompeo, in retaliation for the U.S. air strike that took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a little over two years ago.

Faddis says that American officials are reportedly investigating these two men as perhaps working on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as part of an effort to kill U.S. officials on U.S. soil.

The Daily Mail also has done some solid reporting.

Ironically, this story is developing just as Biden is on the verge of signing a new and even more disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, with part of it, reportedly, being to lift sanctions on the IRGC and remove its designation as a terrorist group. Never mind that it most definitely is a terrorist group. Goodness knows, living at a time when the government can’t even define what a “woman” is, we can’t expect it to be able to define what a “terrorist” is. As Humpty Dumpty once said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

As for the Iran deal, Benjamin Netanyahu has plenty to say about the dangers, but whoever is pulling the strings at the White House isn’t listening.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN. 

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.