Susie Wiles May Have Screwed Trump’s Revenge Quest on Letitia James |
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles may have just ruined any chance President Donald Trump had of reviving his administration’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In a wildly candid interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday, Wiles admitted that Trump’s effort to go after James over flimsy charges of mortgage fraud was his “one retribution.” (He has arguably had far more than one.)
Wiles explained that she hadn’t felt compelled to warn Trump off of James because “she had a half a billion dollars of his money.”
If the Trump administration ever wanted to seek an indictment against James again, it’s more than likely that the opposing legal team would simply have to cite Wiles to get the case tossed out again.
The Justice Department has tried three times to indict James—unsuccessfully in each instance, including one failed attempt as recent as last week. The original indictment against James was dismissed last month when a judge ruled that the Trump administration had improperly appointed the lead attorney, who had no prosecutorial experience at all.
Wiles was quick to claim that many of her quotes were taken out of context, but she’s already been caught lying about what she did and did not say. Multiple members of Trumpworld have voiced support for Wiles in the face of supposedly fake news. Meanwhile, Trump actually confirmed Wiles’s own wild comment about him.
Minnesota Republican Representative Tom Emmer was asked directly if he agreed with President Trump’s assessment that the thousands of Somali residents he represents are “garbage.” He couldn’t give a straight answer.
“Mr. Emmer, do you agree with President Trump that say[s] 5,000 Somali residents in your district in St. Cloud are garbage?” Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manríquez asked Emmer while he walked down a hallway.
The Republican majority whip offered a weak, political nonanswer.
“I think what President Trump has done is raise an issue that is something that we’ve been trying to raise for almost three years,” he replied. “The press refuse to cover things that are right in front of them—”
“Donald Trump said that the Somalis are garbage; that’s what I’m asking you about,” Manríquez replied.
“If you could let me finish, I’d love to answer your question,” Emmer said. “But apparently you wanna have an argument.”
“Well, it’s a yes or no.”
“Maybe you can find someone else that you can have the argument with. ’Cause I’m tellin’ ya, not all Somalis are bad—”
“Thank you.”
“Ninety percent of the … crimes that have been charged are from the Somali community, and there’s nothing wrong, and nothing racist, about calling out crime.”
.@PabloReports: Do you agree with President Trump that Somali residents in your district are garbage?
Emmer: I think what President Trump has done is raise an issue…
PabloReports: Donald Trump said they are garbage, that’s what I’m asking you about [...] It’s a yes or no… pic.twitter.com/CsRO9MJlJS
There is no evidence that 90 percent of the crimes in Emmer’s district are committed by Somalis. Perhaps Emmer was trying to pivot to the scandal in Minnesota, in which the state’s social services system was defrauded out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Federal prosecutors allege that nearly all of the perpetrators came from Minnesota’s Somali community. So far, prosecutors have convicted 59 people. There are about 80,000 Somali Americans in Minnesota.
Trump did much more than just “call out crime.” He smeared an entire group of people simply based on their origin, something he’s made a career out of.
“When you look at what [Minnesota Governor Walz has] done with Somalia, which is barely a country … they have no anything, they just run around killing each other,” Trump said earlier this month. “I hear [Somalians] ripped off that state for billions of dollars … I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody’ll say ‘Ooh that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ’em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ’em in our country.
“We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.… When they come from hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch? We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.”
Representative Ilhan Omar just called the Department of Homeland Security’s bluff after it denied that ICE agents had ever pulled over her son.
DHS claimed Tuesday that the agency had “absolutely ZERO record” of federal agents pulling over Omar’s son, after the Minnesota Democrat revealed over the weekend that her son had been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown targeting the Somali American community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.
“With no evidence, it is shameful that Congresswoman Omar would level accusations to demonize ICE as part of a PR stunt,” DHS said in a statement on X. The department denied that it had committed racial profiling, and said that federal law enforcement uses “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests.
But the Somali American congresswoman doubled down—and told DHS to bring receipts.
“The congresswoman’s son and others were pulled over by ICE, racially profiled, and forced to prove their citizenship with a passport. ICE has long operated as a rogue agency beyond reform,” she said in a statement. “It’s no surprise that an agency known for disappearing people also can’t keep its records straight. ICE now claims it has records of all the stops, and our office would welcome the opportunity to review them.”
It’s pretty ironic that ICE would balk at claims that it engaged in racial profiling after it begged the Supreme Court to