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.”
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