Kristi Noem Fired—and Immediately Rehired—Someone Over a Blanket

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for pink-slipping a Coast Guard pilot and then rehiring them moments later, over a blanket.

Noem and her expired-special-employee chief adviser (and rumored beau) Corey Lewandowski are no strangers to a toxic work environment—rather, they seem to enjoy creating them. The duo are known for frequently berating their senior-level staff and have even demanded that employees submit to polygraph tests as exhibitions of loyalty.

But days after federal agents working under Noem’s purview shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the DHS secretary snapped.

A maintenance issue on one of her planes had forced her to land and deboard to another aircraft, The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday. The sudden switch inspired Lewandowski to fire the U.S. Coast Guard pilot from the first plane, though the pilot’s abilities weren’t the problem: Noem was upset that her blanket had not followed her to her second plane.

The pilot was told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination, according to the Journal’s report.

But moments later, Noem had to backtrack on the pilot’s terminated employment, though she didn’t do so in any admission of wrongdoing. Instead, Noem tapped the pilot to fly her around again because “no one else was available to fly them home,” reported the Journal.

A DHS spokeswoman declined to address the episode but told the newspaper that the secretary had “made personnel decisions to deliver excellence.”

Some of those personnel decisions have been nothing short of seismic. In 2025, Noem and Lewandowski completely reengineered Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their image, firing or demoting approximately 80 percent of the agency’s field leadership.

Their 2026 plans for the agency involve a massive “wartime recruitment” hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new ICE officers in the coming year. Part of that strategy includes spending millions on social media advertisements targeted at gun rights advocates, UFC enthusiasts, and manosphere podcast audiences.

Meanwhile, AI-induced slip-ups have “sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training,” according to law enforcement officials.

Office of Budget and Management Director Russell Vought killed USAID, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and is now using the money he “saved” to bankroll his security detail.

A Reuters report Friday states that the Project 2025 architect who promised to put federal employees “in trauma” is spending $15 million of former USAID funding—money that would have gone toward fighting HIV, polio, malaria, and other diseases—to pay his U.S. Marshal security through the end of the year.

One source told Reuters that Vought has more than a dozen U.S. marshals in his security detail.

While Vought allegedly faced a threat on his life last month, the irony of the man who ripped disease-fighting funding away from some of the most at-risk people in the world only to use it to beef up his personal bodyguard staff is impossible to ignore.

This is yet another example of Trump officials’ questionable personal spending habits. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Homeland Security is leasing a $70 million jet that Secretary Kristi Noem and her alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski use to travel in luxury. And what’s up with that $400 million White House ballroom?

Disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein said he had “new administration people” visiting his Little Saint James Island in 2016—just a month before President Trump’s first inauguration. 

In a December 2016 email to Bill Gates, Epstein told him to “come to visit the island. New administration people visiting.” 

We can only speculate which people from the colorful cast of Trump characters were on pedophile island, but one possibility is Steve Bannon, Trump’s then adviser, who had a genuine friendship with Epstein. Stephen Feinberg, now Trump’s deputy secretary of defense, was also close to Trump in his first term and has been named in the files.

“These people are playing in our faces,” political commentator Nina Turner wrote on X. ”They need to be charged. Period.”

“Donald Trump did drain the swamp, right from the White House to Epstein Island,” one X user wrote.

This document only publicly reaffirms the connection to the perverted financier that people in both Trump’s first and second term have had—and in some cases lied about. On Thursday, another email from 2016 showed Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz inviting Epstein to his Valentine’s Day party—eight years after Epstein was registered as a sex offender. And on Wednesday,  Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted he visited Epstein’s pedophile island with his wife and children in 2012 after he lied dramatically about cutting off all contact with the predator. 

The whistleblower complaint against Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard was related to a conversation between two foreign nationals about Jared Kushner, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke with The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

The Journal could not determine where the foreign nationals were from, or what they had discussed about Kushner. But if verified, the allegations against the president’s son-in-law recorded in the conversation would be significant, U.S. officials told the Journal. They added that there was currently no corroborating evidence, but that didn’t mean the allegations lack any merit.

Senior Trump administration officials denied the allegations about Kushner but did not offer any more details about the conversation, in order to preserve security around a sensitive surveillance method.

Kushner is deeply embedded in the Trump administration’s national security dealings—as a front for a series of pretty blatant real estate and land development grifts. Kushner has previously been under scrutiny for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In May, a whistleblower accused Gabbard of restricting the distribution of a highly classified intelligence report for political purposes. Typically, an employee is able to share a complaint alleging wrongdoing directly with lawmakers, as long as the director of national intelligence instructs them on how to securely transmit it. But eight months later, and the whistleblower’s complaint was still not transmitted to Congress—and was reportedly locked away in a safe. A heavily redacted version of the report finally arrived in Congress last week.

Christopher Fox, the inspector general for the intelligence community, claimed that Gabbard was only informed in December that she needed to provide security guidance in order to transmit the complaint. Former I.C. Inspector General Tamara Johnson had determined that the allegation against Gabbard “did not appear credible,” but Fox noted that that determination had “no legal effect” on the whistleblower’s right to submit the complaint to Congress.

In May, Kushner reportedly advised administration officials in negotiations with Arab leaders, ahead of Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East.

What country can flex that the man in charge of its public health policy proudly snorts cocaine off of toilets? As far as this writer is aware, just the United States.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boasted about his drug-huffing past during an interview with podcaster Theo Von Thursday, claiming that his strong immune system was all thanks to times that he railed lines from the porcelain throne straight to the dome.

Referring to times during the pandemic when he insisted on attending 12-step meetings in person, Kennedy insisted that his brazen attitude toward viral infections was due to the fact that he “used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

Kennedy then explained that the real disease, to him, was his addiction, which he said would “kill him” if he didn’t attend daily recovery meetings.

For a quick comparison on the rapid degradation of American politics: Just last week marked the 10-year anniversary of when Jeb Bush encouraged a small but tepid audience to “please clap”—a misstep that, at the time, was received with such abhorrence by the American public that it almost immediately spelled the end of his political career.

Yet somehow, Kennedy will likely move on from this interview completely unfazed by the blatant admission of his illicit behavior.

Meanwhile, the 72-year-old’s bizarre health conspiracies have wreaked havoc on America’s public health policies. During a measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy refused to endorse the tried and true measles vaccine, recommending instead that susceptible residents self-medicate with vitamins. He has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

And last month, the health secretary unveiled the outcome of his department’s monthslong project to reimagine the food pyramid. The result: an upside-down triangle in which butter, steak, and cheese play a leading role.