A top Department of Homeland Security official is desperately clinging to the false claim that an ICU nurse shot dead by a federal agent in Minnesota was a “domestic terrorist.”
Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary, managed to make a softball interview on Fox News look difficult after host Dana Perino asked if she was committing to the knee-jerk reaction from her agency to smear the dead man as a “domestic terrorist.”
McLaughlin squirmed in her chair after the host played a clip of her boss, ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, calling the man, Alex Pretti, just that on Saturday. She was asked if she is still committed to calling the slain ICU nurse, who did not draw his weapon, a terrorist.
And, in typical word salad fashion, she danced around the subject.
“That situation we have seen on the ground in Minneapolis is a highly coordinated campaign of violence against our law enforcement. Your viewers have seen the images. In this case, we saw an individual who was armed,” she began. “He got into a physical altercation with law enforcement. He was in the course of obstructing a federal operation, which is a federal crime. The Department of Homeland Security, we work every day to make sure we give the American people swift, accurate information, and so we’ll continue to do that.”
After the elongated rant, Perino immediately countered, “But, are you standing by calling him a domestic terrorist?”
“Well, we’ll let this investigation that Homeland Security investigators are leading, the FBI is supporting, that CBP is doing a separate internal investigation as well, Dana,” she spluttered.
“OK, then I guess it stands,” Perino said, giving up and moving on.
Noem was not the only one to label the man a terrorist, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller also rolling out the terminology to perpetrate a MAGA-washed version of the truth.
Miller trumpeted this rhetoric and then took it a step further, calling Pretti an “assassin” who had sought “to murder federal agents.”
In a press conference two days later, after footage circulated showing Pretti had been disarmed before he was shot, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say if Miller intended to apologize for smearing a dead man but distanced her boss President Donald Trump from the “domestic terrorist” label.
“I have not heard the president characterize Mr. Pretti that way,” she told reporters.
