In Senate Testimony on DHS Shootings, Kristi Noem Lies About Her Lies

After Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees fatally shot Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti on January 24, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed he was “brandishing” a gun and “attacked those officers.” She also said Pretti “committed an act of domestic terrorism.”

None of that was true, as bystander video immediately showed. But when given the opportunity to correct the record during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Noem instead lied about what she had said. Her obfuscation and dishonesty provoked angry rebukes not only from the Democrats on the committee but also from Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.), who reiterated his recommendation that she resign.

“I did not call [Pretti] a domestic terrorist,” Noem told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.). “I said it appeared to be an incident of [domestic terrorism].” Noem offered the same revisionist account when Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) asked her about the “domestic terrorism” label. “In answer to questions at the press conference that afternoon,” she said, “it was that it appeared to be” domestic terrorism.

Here is what Noem actually said on the day of the shooting: “When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism. This individual, who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers, committed an act of domestic terrorism. That’s the facts.”

Those were not, in fact, the facts. Videos showed that Pretti never “attacked those officers” and never drew his holstered pistol, which he was licensed to carry. The officers did not even notice the gun until after they tackled him, and he had been disarmed by the time the shooting started. Yet Noem did not merely say Pretti “appeared to be” a domestic terrorist, which would have been bad enough; she asserted, flat out, that he was a domestic terrorist.

By contrast, the official DHS statement about the incident hedged a bit. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” it said.

Initial impressions are often wrong, of course, which is why it was reckless to describe Pretti as a would-be mass murderer just a couple of hours after he was shot. That is especially true because the only basis for that characterization was the self-interested account of the same immigration agents whose conduct was at issue.

“We were being relayed information from on the ground from CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents and officers that were there,” Noem said during a Fox News interview five days after Pretti’s death. “We were using the best information we had at the time.”

Noem reiterated that excuse during Tuesday’s hearing. “We were relying, in the hours after that incident that was so horrific, on information we were getting from the ground from our agents,” she told Klobuchar. “We’re relying on reports from the ground and from agents that are there,” she told Sen. Richard Durbin (D–Ill.). “I was getting reports from the ground from agents at the scene, and I would say that it was a chaotic scene.”

Given all the chaos and uncertainty, Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) suggested, it might have been premature to accuse a dead man of domestic terrorism. He noted that Noem also described Minneapolis protester Renee Good, who was fatally shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, as a domestic terrorist.

Good, who was behind the wheel of her Honda Pilot at the time, “proceeded to weaponize her vehicle” and “attempted to run a law enforcement officer over,” Noem said the day of that shooting. “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.”

That account also was undermined by video of the incident. The footage showed that Good was steering away from Ross and the other ICE officers at the scene when she was killed, suggesting she did not deliberately try to run him down.

“Who told you that these two victims were engaged in domestic terrorism?” Schiff asked Noem. “Where’d you get that information from?”

Noem reiterated that “those reports were coming from on the ground,” from “agents that were there,” and that “it was a chaotic scene.” She added that “my team was working with me, talking to those agents on the ground to relay as much information as possible that we could to the American people.”

If those sources “told you” that Pretti and Good were “domestic terrorists,” Schiff asked, “did they tell you whether they had any basis for that claim within either minutes or hours of the shooting?…Did you determine whether there was any basis for the sensational claim, a claim that proved to be utterly false, that these two victims were engaged in domestic terrorism?”

Notably, Noem did not rebut Schiff’s description of those claims as “utterly false.” Instead, she noted that “there is an investigation ongoing.” She said “the FBI is leading that” and “there’s also an internal investigation.” She promised that “we’ll continue to bring the facts forward,” as if that is what she has been doing all along. The fact that investigations are ongoing, of course, only underlines Noem’s recklessness in describing Pretti and Good as domestic terrorists and asserting that they were killed in self-defense, thereby prejudging the outcomes of those investigations.

Schiff pressed Noem, emphasizing that he was asking about “your statements in the immediate aftermath of these shootings,” which were “based on completely unvetted information” that “proved to be utterly false.” He wondered how those statements might affect her department’s reputation: “Do you have any concern about misleading the whole country? Don’t you think in the immediate aftermath of a shooting that you should provide only vetted information to the public? How do you imagine you are going to gain the trust of the American people if you’re pushing out false information about the shooting of American citizens?”

Again, Noem did not challenge the premise that she had passed on “utterly false” information about the shootings. “I work every day to get factual information to the American people,” she lamely replied.

“How is the public to have any confidence in investigations done of excessive use [of force] by ICE agents,” Schiff asked, when “you make immediate and false statements about the victims?…How is the public supposed to believe anything your agency says or finds?” Noem insisted “these investigations are being done in the same way that they always are,” implying that you would, of course, expect the head of a law enforcement agency to declare in advance what the findings will be.

At a previous hearing, Durbin pointed out, “CBP and ICE officials testified under oath that their agencies did not inform you that Pretti was a domestic terrorist.” And in addition to calling Pretti and Good domestic terrorists, he noted, the DHS applied the same label to Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by an ICE agent in Chicago last October. As Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella noted last month, the department “refuses to retract its previous statements calling Martinez a ‘domestic terrorist,'” even though prosecutors dropped the charges she initially faced.

Durbin gave Noem another chance. “We have ample video evidence and eyewitness testimony proving you are wrong,” he said. “Let me give you an opportunity to do the right thing. Do you retract these statements identifying these individuals as domestic terrorists?”

It is unfortunate when DHS employees shoot people, Noem conceded. “When we have these situations happen, we always offer our condolences to those families, and I offer mine as well,” she said. “These are tragic situations, and I can’t imagine what these families go through in losing a loved one….We always work to provide the American people with as much information as possible that we’re relying on reports from the ground and from agents that are there and working to be transparent. And we’ll continue to do all that we can to provide the accurate information and the facts to people.”

Again, you can’t “continue to do” something you have repeatedly and egregiously failed to do. Noem preposterously describes her snap judgments as “working to be transparent” when they were, at best, reckless misrepresentations that obscured the truth.

In the face of all this bullshit, Tillis lost his patience. As the additional facts that Noem refused to wait for come to light, he predicted, “it’s gonna prove that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back.” He expressed exasperation at “the fact that you can’t admit to a mistake.”

Law enforcement “needs to learn” from such mistakes, Tillis shouted. “You don’t protect them by not looking after the facts!…We’ve gotta make it clear [that] when they make a mistake, then they get corrected for it! But you don’t walk away from it, and you’ve done it too many times!”

Tillis also noted cases in which U.S. citizens have been wrongly detained by immigration agents and suggested that DHS employees have repeatedly made such errors because the department is desperate to hit arbitrary deportation numbers. “Quality matters, not quantity,” he said. “And what we’ve seen is a disaster under your leadership!” Noem’s performance has been so bad that “we’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong,” he complained. “The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”

Tillis waved a letter from the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) that he said “cites 10 different instances under Ms. Noem’s leadership where they’ve been misled and not allowed to pursue investigations that they think are critically important.” He emphasized the significance of those complaints: “Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the OIG in this agency to come out and do this publicly? That is stonewalling. That’s a failure of leadership, and that is why I’ve called for your resignation.”

Since Noem can’t even forthrightly admit that she slandered Pretti and Good, it seems unlikely that she will heed that call. But a president who valued honesty, transparency, and accountability would already have canned her.