... Self-dealing played a direct role in Noem’s defenestration.
The department approved a $220 million contract — funneled in part through firms run by Noem and Lewandowski allies — for an ad campaign encouraging illegal immigrants to go home.
The ad starred — who else? — Kristi Noem, on horseback and in chaps.
The implicit message was that if illegal immigrants didn’t leave on their own, she’d immediately form a posse and run them over the border.
It was a production worthy of a spaghetti Western, or — more to the point, given her political ambitions — a commercial for a 2028 presidential campaign.
Noem couldn’t defend the sketchy spending decisions, or the blatantly self-glorifying ad, or much of anything else in the brutal back-to-back House and Senate hearings that precipitated her doom.
She’d already been taken down a notch after the Minneapolis ICE operation went sideways. ...
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| https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-dhs-secretary-kristi-noem-describes-ad-campaign/5195580 |
