Trump’s bad penny is still around, making life awful for people. (I suppose that’s why he’s such a Trump favorite.)
Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager-turned-Department of Homeland Security senior adviser, is involved in green-lighting six-figure contracts at the agency, according to an administration official and two FEMA officials.
His involvement has contributed to a bottleneck at the agency that has rankled members of the administration, frustrated at both the delays and Lewandowski’s role as a so-called special governmental employee, the three officials said.
Lewandowski has veto power over DHS contracts and grants that exceed $100,000, according to one of the FEMA officials and the administration official, who, like the others in this article, were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the process. And he is the last stop before contracts move to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s desk, said the second FEMA official, who has personally seen his signature on an approval. He does not sign contracts in place of Noem.
The second FEMA official described Lewandowski’s authority at the agency most responsible for carrying out Trump’s mass deportation plan as “insane,” saying his role has impeded FEMA operations through the new DHS protocol of manually reviewing routine contracts.
“Corey is part of the problem,” said the administration official. “It doesn’t matter how quickly we get it there, it doesn’t just go straight to her desk.”
Obviously, this is a serious problem. It’s also the result of the fact that Lewandowski is working as a “special government employee” (which means no vetting necessary) because he and Noem are having an affair that they aren’t even really trying to hide. And apparently nobody in Trump world even cares.
Here’s that sordid story
[R[]umors of their alleged affair have followed the two since 2019, when they started appearing on the GOP event circuit together. I have no new evidence that they are indeed an item, but sources who’ve seen them together at Republican events have been saying this for a long time. It’s intensely, morbidly amusing to imagine. So why don’t we imagine it?
Let’s run through the reports. Noem and Lewandowski began arousing suspicion when they began appearing together at GOP events across the country, sometimes arriving on donors’ private planes and looking awfully cozy with one another. Observers allegedly witnessed their flirtations against some of the least sexy backdrops known to American life: conferences for conservatives, gatherings of Republican officials, candidate fundraising dinners. Now, they spend their time together touring immigrant surveillance facilities and playing SWAT dress-up in armored military vehicles.
For the average paramour, this would be a disappointing landscape for the pursuit of passion. But it does not require a protracted stretch of the imagination to envision the settings of right-wing hobnobbing and anti-immigrant law enforcement as fruitful grounds for a MAGA-world kink. If you’re drawn to the project of lawlessly abducting brown people and sending them to barbaric prisons as a show of force and white dominance, doing it alongside an object of love or lust might offer a special kind of gratification.
The two supposed lovebirds haven’t been doing much to quell all the rumors over the years. One source told the New York Post that their handsiness at a hotel bar during the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 was “absurdly blatant and public,” with more than 100 other conferencegoers in the room. Two other Post sources said they saw Noem sitting on Lewandowski’s lap at an event at Mar-a-Lago in 2020. In interviews with the Daily Mail, two former Noem staffers said that, in 2022, they were instructed to keep the then–South Dakota governor’s schedule private from her husband in an effort to hide the scope of her relationship with Lewandowski.
Several people who have spoken to the press call the relationship an open secret in Trump circles. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported, the alleged romance made Trump and his advisers balk at the idea of Lewandowski taking on an official role as Noem’s chief of staff, which led to him serving in his current gray-area position.
It wasn’t the first time the alleged affair affected their career prospects. When Trump was looking for a running mate in 2024, Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt wrote in his book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, Trump’s aides believed that if Noem was selected, “her relationship with Lewandowski would become one hell of a distraction.” (It’s kind of a comforting throwback to a time when Republicans cared about heterosexual morality.)
It’s all so very Trumpy. The only thing that I find mystifying is what women see in Corey Lewandowski. He was rumored to have had an affair with Trump’s former body-gal, Hope Hicks too! Why?