Kristi Noem was fired as homeland-security secretary after multiple scandals including self-promotion, lavish spending, and a controversial relationship with Corey Lewandowski. Her fatal mistake was publicly implicating President Trump in her controversial ad campaign, violating his principle of avoiding responsibility.
Key Takeaways
•Noem faced scandals over $220 million in self-promoting ad contracts and luxurious department spending including a plane with a queen bed.
•Her relationship with Corey Lewandowski, who acted as a de facto co-head of DHS despite legal limits, raised ethical concerns and romantic speculation.
•At a House hearing, Noem refused to deny a romantic relationship with Lewandowski and defended him as a special government employee.
•Her fatal error was publicly stating Trump approved her ad campaign, which angered the president and led to her firing.
•Trump reassigned Noem as 'Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas' after removing her, comparing her dismissal to putting down a dog.
She probably should have seen Trump’s decision to find a new homeland-security secretary coming. Andrew Harnik / Getty Kristi Noem’s autobiography includes the harrowing story of her decision to put down her dog, Cricket. The ill-fated pet had first ruined a hunting foray by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and went on to kill several chickens belonging to a neighbor. Noem then decided she had to shoot Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she recounts, “but it had to be done.”
After Noem’s latest public-relations fiasco, a shambolic session before Congress this week, President Trump found himself facing a similarly difficult choice.
As homeland-security secretary, Noem personally generated more scandals over the past year than a normal presidency would muster in four. Her department approved $220 million in contracts for advertisements that feature herself warning illegal immigrants that they face deportation. One contract went to a firm that has ties to Noem, and the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s former spokesperson.
Not only did the secretary spend lavishly to promote herself as a ruthless law enforcer, but she also lived in high style. Her department leased a luxurious plane with a queen bed, a kitchen, four televisions, and a bar. The official explanation was that the vehicle “will serve dual missions—both as ICE deportation flights and for cabinet level travel,” a strange expenditure for a department that otherwise seems to delight in mistreating detainees.
In her defense, Noem appears particularly sensitive to the discomfort of substandard air travel. TheWall Street Journalreported last month that a maintenance issue had forced Noem to switch planes, and when the pilot neglected to move her blanket to the new plane, he was fired on the spot, before being reinstated because there was nobody else available to fly her home.
Even while spending DHS’s resources profligately, Noem subjected the rest of the department to ruinous parsimony. She sent a memo in June requiring that she personally approve any expense costing more than $100,000, a bottleneck that frustrated her underlings, causing the delay of more than 1,000 contracts and disaster-relief grants.
Many of her difficulties stemmed from her relationship with Corey Lewandowski. Trump blocked Lewandowski, his former aide, from working as Noem’s chief of staff, in part over concerns that the two have maintained a romantic relationship—a claim they both deny. They are both married, but not to each other.
Lewandowski evaded this ban by taking a role as a special government employee, limited by law to working no more than 130 days a year for the federal government. Axios reported that he evaded this limit by, among other methods, having DHS employees let him into the building so that he didn’t have to swipe his card. (The department disputes this.) In his supposedly part-time role, he acted as something like a co-head of the department. “Everything has to go through Corey,” a lobbyist who has worked with DHS told Ben Terris of New York magazine: “It’s all based on ‘You’re my buddy, or you’re not my buddy. You hired my friend, or you didn’t hire my friend.’ That place just runs that way.”
At a House hearing yesterday, Noem declined repeatedly under oath to deny having a romantic relationship with her subordinate. “I am shocked that we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this hearing in this committee today,” she said angrily but nonresponsively. “I would tell you that he is a special government employee who works for the White House. There are thousands of them in the federal government.” The trouble is that of the thousands of special government employees, Lewandowski is apparently the most special.
In all probability, Noem’s fatal error was not infidelity, incompetence, or self-enrichment. All of these are sins that Trump would likely understand. What reportedly killed her was pointing the finger at her boss.
Senator John Kennedy, somewhat unexpectedly for a Republican from Louisiana, grilled Noem for having leaked to reporters that the adviser Stephen Miller gave her bad information that led her to accuse Alex Pretti of “domestic terrorism” after immigration agents working for her department shot and killed the Minnesota man. Responding to Kennedy, Noem attacked the story for using anonymous sources.
Noem also said that Trump had approved her controversial ad campaign. Her statement reportedly annoyed the president so deeply that he contradicted it in public and began calling Republicans to discuss firing Noem.
Whether Noem was telling the truth is beside the point. The president, trained by the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, famously avoids giving written orders and looks askance at lawyers who take notes during his meetings. To publicly implicate him in the chain of responsibility is to violate what seems to be the president’s most sacred principle.
Cricket was shot for yapping uncontrollably, bungling the mission, and killing innocent bystanders. Noem’s misdeeds are very similar, but she will be treated more mercifully. Trump announced that he will install his deposed homeland-security secretary as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas”—a new and apparently vital position that had been coincidentally set to be announced this weekend.
There is no better choice than Noem for the distinction of being the first Cabinet member to be removed from this administration. She was fired, as Trump might put it, like a dog.
