Dem
55
Ties
1
GOP
44
Kristi Noem was having a great time—with her lover Corey Lewandowski and their luxurious flying bedroom—until Donald Trump got tried of them and fired her. Having murdered her dog and divorced her somewhat, er, eccentric, husband, at least she was past all this and could move on. Or maybe not. The Democrats have other plans for her come January. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, tweeted: "Noem, Markwayne, Miller, Homan, Bovino, what's up? Clear your schedule."
Noem was one of the key architects of the mass deportations that have been going on in Trump v2.0, and much of what she did was probably illegal. She was a small-town girl who was elected Snow Queen in high school, was elected to the South Dakota House, the U.S. House, and was governor of South Dakota when Trump snatched her up to make her secretary of Homeland Security. By all measures, it went to her head and she forgot (or never knew) that Trump picked her not because she was an expert on homeland security, but because she is very pretty and he falls for that. She also mixed with bad company (Lewandowski). She was in way over her head and became much too arrogant. It is about to be payback time.
Rep. Benny Thompson (D-MS), who will chair the House Homeland Security Committee in January, is going to investigate the hell out of her. First, he wants to investigate every murder a DHS agent committed and every death at a DHS facility while she was secretary. Second, Trump's BBB gave her a gargantuan budget and free rein to spend it. She (with the help from Lewandowski) made some choices they are now going to have to account for. One of them was the flying bedroom, which ultimately cost the government $108 million as a result of a no-bid contract from a company run by donor William Walters. She is going to have to explain why she couldn't travel commercial or simple chartered jets when she needed to go somewhere that didn't have commercial service.
Thompson suspects that an agency with so much money, and with such an inexperienced person running it, is bound to have done a lot of... irregularities, and that Noem was probably not very good at hiding her tracks either. She expanded ICE's detention capacity enormously. Was there competitive bidding for all the facilities? Did she choose the best bids in all cases? Did any of her donors bid and how did they do? These are questions Thompson wants answered and more.
Another area Thompson is interested in is how much training ICE agents got before they were put out in the field. Besides learning how to shoot people, were they taught about the law and what agents may and may not do? Were they taught that bystanders every legal right to witness and record ICE operations in public, as long as they do not prevent the officers from doing their work? He also wants to know how she dealt with whistleblowers who alerted her that agents were breaking the law. Finally, there might be a question or two about the $220 million ad campaign starring herself, all gussied up, on a horse. Oh, and the no-bid contract went to a brand-new company run by people with close ties to her. And to top it off, she commissioned a gold statue of herself and the horse—at taxpayer expense of course.
It should be interesting to see how many times she pleads the Fifth Amendment and how many times she pleads ignorance. (V)