Immigration and Customs Enforcement won’t say whether findings from its investigation into the source of an election-eve leak about the immigration status of Barack Obama’s aunt will be made public.
Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for ICE, told TPMMuckraker in an email: “I … don’t know if the results [of the probe] are made public.”
Just days before the election, the Associated Press reported, sourced to a federal law enforcement official, that Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, had ignored a deportation order issued four years ago by a U.S. immigration judge. The leak appeared to be a politically motivated effort to damage Obama’s candidacy at the eleventh hour.
ICE, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, quickly announced that it had launched an investigation into the source of the leak, which, according to our reporting, clearly violated government regulations, and could even make it more likely that Onyango could be persecuted for having sought asylum in the U.S. if she is ultimately deported to Kenya.
But now it appears that we may never know the identity of the leaker.