Congressional Democrats have accused former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of lying under oath during the heated congressional hearings that predated her ouster from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet earlier this month.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees, asked the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation into whether Noem knowingly committed perjury during her congressional testimony.
Noem was removed from her position as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security one day after the hearings cited in the letter, during which she faced intense grilling from lawmakers over everything from DHS officers’ aggressive immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota to her relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a Trump ally and DHS special adviser.
“Ater months of evading our Committees’ requests to testify in routine oversight hearings, Secretary Noem made a series of demonstrably false statements in a brazen attempt to undermine critical congressional oversight of the Department of Homeland Security,” Durbin and Raskin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The Democrats cited Noem’s answers to questions about whether the taxpayer-funded $220 million television ad campaign that prominently features her and was produced by a firm with which she has close ties was subject to a competitive bid. Noem said Trump knew about and had approved the ad campaign, but the president said in a phone interview with Reuters the next day that he “never knew anything about it.”
“Even if Secretary Noem was the one telling the truth about the President’s knowledge, and she may well have been, she flatly misrepresented that the contract had been subject to a competitive bid,” the letter said.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Noem’s position that DHS has consistently complied with court orders to release individuals from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention was also a point raised in the letter. Under Noem, the department repeatedly defied court orders and refused to release individuals in ICE custody for days or weeks after a court-ordered date, the Democrats argued in the letter.








