A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official, who had said that “one or more” terror attacks in the U.S. could have been prevented if not for the Obama administration’s prioritizing political correctness over safety, was found dead Friday from a gunshot wound, reports say.

Philip Haney, as a whistleblower, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2016 that DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files of people with ties to Islamist terrorist groups, arguing terrorist attacks against people in the United States could have been prevented if certain files had not been scrubbed, the Washington Examiner noted in a Feb. 22 report.

“It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009,” Haney wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill in February 2016. “It is demoralizing — and infuriating — that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.”

The Amador County Sheriff’s office said that deputies and detectives responded to reports Friday morning at 10:12 a.m. of a male subject with a gunshot wound on the ground in the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth, California.

“Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound. A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

Red State and Heavy reported that Haney had been missing since Wednesday, and that the gunshot wound was found in his chest.

Several reports cited friends of Haney as saying they found it difficult to believe that Haney had taken his own life.

The Examiner, citing sources close to Haney as saying he was recently in contact with top officials about returning to work for the DHS. Additionally, Haney was engaged to be married.

Speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, a friend who’s known Haney for 40 years told CCN. com: “Knowing his strong Christian faith, his dogged pursuit of truth and his love for America, and his upcoming marriage, it seems highly unlikely that he committed suicide.