ICE Barbie Kristi Noem’s Ugly New Attack on CBS Exposes Big Trump Scam

If you need more evidence that there’s zero percentage in trying to appease or bargain with authoritarians, check out what happened this weekend when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked CBS News for supposedly editing her Face the Nation appearance in a deceptive way. Unsurprisingly, it concerned the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, about whom Noem and other Trump officials have lied relentlessly for months on end.

Noem’s claim really amounts to a declaration that she is entitled to have her vile smears of Abrego Garcia air undisturbed, no matter how viciously dishonest. But what makes this even more galling is the larger context here, which has gone largely unremarked upon: It comes after CBS News settled a massive lawsuit with Trump—to the tune of $16 million—in which he made a very similar, equally ludicrous charge of deceptive editing. Turns out that didn’t placate Trump officials or get them to back off these underhanded tactics in the slightest.

Noem’s attack on CBS is that the network supposedly suppressed footage of her comments about Abrego Garcia. Noem posted this video juxtaposing her fuller comments to CBS with what actually ended up airing on the network:

The careful viewer will notice that just about all of the remarks that did not air are lies, distortions, and charges that Abrego Garcia has merely been accused by the government of committing, not convicted of in court. Here’s a transcript of Noem comments that were supposedly “suppressed”:

This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who’s a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors. And even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off, he was so sick in what he was doing and how he was treating small children. So he needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we’re doing all that we can to bring him to justice.

In reality, Trump officials utterly failed to produce anything serious tying Abrego Garcia to MS-13, even though they actively searched for such evidence for many months in what became a kind of whole-of-government mission involving numerous senior officials and multiple major agencies.

As for the “human smuggler” claim, the government has charged him in Tennessee with trafficking migrants. But the whole case stinks: A senior prosecutor in that office resigned, reportedly because the case seemed dubious. More importantly, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have plausibly claimed that the administration tried to coerce him to plead guilty to those charges by threatening to deport him to Uganda if he did not.

It’s bad enough for government officials to go on national television and rattle off a litany of hideously damning charges as fact when they haven’t yet been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. In this case, officials apparently went to extraordinarily depraved lengths to try to coerce a guilty plea, which doesn’t exactly exude confidence in the strength of those charges to begin with.

Indeed, on the photo-solicitation charge, Politifact points out that this isn’t even in the indictment against Abrego Garcia, and is a matter the government is merely investigating. Yet Noem keeps repeating the claim as if it’s an established truth, as she did on CBS here.

Responding to Noem, a CBS spokesperson says the full interview was posted on line, and notes that cuts were made to fit the segment into a limited time-slot. As it happens, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this edit, and it’s fairly common for networks to do this with lengthy interviews.

But it’s worth going further than this spokesperson did: Not airing footage of Noem’s lies and smears unchallenged was, journalistically speaking, the correct thing to do. CBS News is under no obligation to air them, and arguably should not have. If anything, CBS bent over backward to let her have her say, posting full video of the interview online, including her making those charges—which, again, are unproven—with no serious rebuttal.

Let’s also not forget that this comes barely two months after Trump’s settlement with CBS News. As you’ll recall, CBS handed over $16 million largely to Trump’s future presidential library after Trump sued CBS for supposedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign.

Here again, with this edit, CBS didn’t do anything wrong, and many lawyers had predicted CBS would have won in court if it had litigated. But executives at CBS parent company Paramount viewed the settlement as a way to facilitate the Trump administration’s approval of its merger with Skydance, which was subsequently completed in August.

It’s telling that despite that settlement, Noem has now gone right back to the same poisoned well, accusing CBS of the same bogus “deceptive editing” scam that Trump used to extort CBS last time around. Why, it’s almost as if CBS’s initial willingness to settle in the face of equally bogus claims just might have encouraged Trump’s thugs to do exactly the same thing again—this time not to extort money, perhaps, but maybe to game the refs so they’re more willing to air their scurrilous smears without challenge next time.

CBS’s response to this latest saga has been largely defensive and even taken on a pleading quality. In a sense, posting the full video of the interview—including numerous unrebutted lies about Abrego Garcia—lets Noem and her falsehoods get their way, and then some.

So perhaps it’s time for news organizations to state unabashedly and affirmatively that they are not in the business of amplifying Trump officials’ lies and smears, and any official who feels entitled to such amplification can go stuff it. Perhaps other journalists should stand with them as they do so. Let Noem shriek into the MAGA disinformation abyss about it all she likes—this is a sleazy little scam, and there’s no need to get pushed around by it any longer.