White House Secret Service personnel duped by fake DHS agents

Two men charged with impersonating Homeland Security agents “compromised” Secret Service personnel assigned to protect first lady Jill Biden and the White House by “lavishing” them with gifts that included rent-free apartments, prosecutors said Friday as they asked a federal judge to hold the duo without bail.

One of the men, Arian Taherzadeh, has admitted he impersonated a DHS agent, and falsely identified himself to others as a former U.S. Army Ranger, prosecutors wrote in a filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., which said the impersonations went on “for years.

Taherzadeh, 40, also told authorities that his co-defendant in the case, 35-year-old Hader Ali, “funded most of their day-to-day operations but Taherzadeh did not know the source of the funds,” the filing says.

Both men, who are U.S. citizens, “pose a danger to the community based on their use and possession of firearms and other weaponry in furtherance of their impersonation of federal law enforcement officers,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.

The filing also says that Ali’s travel in past years to Iran, Pakistan and Doha, Qatar — as well as his claims to have connections to Pakistan’s intelligence agency — make him a flight risk.

And the filing notes that Taherzadeh in February 2020 applied for a concealed weapons permit, but “was denied due to his prior history of violence and instability,” which included two cases in which he was charged in 2013 with assaulting two different women, his wife and his girlfriend.

That filing contains photos of handguns, ammunition, body armor brass knuckles, a fingerprint kit, lock picking tools, and a box of documents with profiles of various people that were seized Wednesday at the men’s apartments in a building in Southeast Washington.

“In one document, an invoice for the defendants’ Chevrolet Impala, the customer
information is listed as ‘Secret Service US’ with fake and fictitious names, such as the ‘authorizer
name’ listed as ‘Fay Tate’ and the ‘driver name’ listed as ‘James Haider,’ an obvious variation
on Haider Ali,” the filing says.

Taherzadeh and Ali are scheduled to appear Friday afternoon at a detention hearing in Washington.

Prosecutors say that while they were claiming to be law enforcement agents involved in covert operations for DHS, “they compromised United States Secret Service (USSS) personnel involved in protective details and with access to the White House complex by lavishing gifts upon them, including rent-free living.”

Four Secret Service personnel have been placed on leave as a result of the case.

The Secret…