"The lies that you and this regime spread are creating a culture that fosters abusive power." Senator Hirono to Noem.
The sharpest moments of the hearing came when senator after senator pressed Noem to retract her baseless claim that Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- two American citizens shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis -- were domestic terrorists. She refused every time.
When Senator Klobuchar (D-MN) told her that Pretti's parents said being called a domestic terrorist was "one of the most hurtful things they could ever imagine," Noem wouldn't apologize, instead splitting hairs: "I did not call him a domestic terrorist. I said it appeared to be an incident of domestic terrorism." The heads of ICE and CBP have both said they provided no information to support that claim. Senator Durbin (D-IL) responded simply: "Is it so hard to say you were wrong?"
Even Republicans turned on her. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) pressed Noem on an Axios report in which she told a source that "everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen" -- an apparent attempt to shift responsibility for the chaos of the Minneapolis crackdown and the domestic terrorist smears onto Stephen Miller and Trump himself. Trump called Pretti a "gunman" and an "agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist," while Miller went further, explicitly branding both Good and Pretti "domestic terrorists" on social media in the hours after their murders.
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