Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to “massacre” them.
That language has now become a source of controversy in the Trump administration. White House officials are now blaming Customs and Border Patrol for furnishing inaccurate information, while others are targeting Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, six sources with knowledge of the situation told Axios.
You don’t say.
Miller’s power extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she’s a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.
Oh my.
Here’s the tick tock:
Immediately after Pretti was fatally shot in Minneapolis about 10:05 a.m. ET on Saturday, administration officials in Washington knew they had a potential disaster on their hands but had little information. The officers directly involved in the shooting “all shut up and got lawyers real quick so there wasn’t a lot of information,” one source briefed on the statement said.
The CBP officers on the ground furnished a report that, White House officials told Axios, left officials with the belief that Pretti had brandished a gun. Miller “heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops,” a source briefed on the process of assembling the press statement said. “Any early comments made were based on information sent to the White House through CBP,” Miller told Axios in response to an earlier version of this story in which others blamed him for the “massacre” statement.
DHS posted the statement at 12:31 p.m. on X. Some White House officials had signed off on the statement. But others had not, leaving them frustrated.[…]
Minutes after the DHS statement, Miller posted on X and called Pretti “an assassin,” which a source said was also based on a preliminary report from Customs and Border Patrol.Vice President Vance then reposted it on his page.
Noem subsequently used that language at a news conference, as did the Border Patrol commander then overseeing operations in the Twin Cities, Greg Bovino.
Some members of the White House team blamed Bovino and Miller is saying that the Minnesota operation didn’t follow some new guidelines which would have divided the DBP between certain officers targeting the “criminal aliens” (which means all immigrants and anyone who looks at them sideways) and others deployed for crowd control to keep the “agitators” from interfering. Yeah, whatever. Like that would have changed anything.
Noem met with Trump for two hours on Monday night and Trump said today that he backs her to the hilt.
Noem has complained to others that she feels she’s being hung out to dry over the episode and has made sure to emphasize she took direction from Miller and the president, a source told Axios.
She may deny she said it but it wouldn’t have been leaked to Axios if she didn’t want it out there. Let the battle begin. (I have no doubt that in the end, Trump will choose Miller.)
There is also no doubt in my mind that just as the operation is 100% a MIller special so was the communications strategy that had them rush to the cameras and condemn Pretti. Miller knows the value of controlling the narrative and he wanted that out there. The videos killed the plan.
Miller, like Trump, just refuses to believe that reality will ever bite. They just got bitten.