Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem denied on Tuesday that her congressional testimony from March was a flashpoint that ultimately led to her dismissal as a Cabinet member.
“I know it seemed that way to the American public, but the president and I had been talking about it for about a week or two before that,” she said on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria. “We knew there might be a transition, and we had conversations about it.”
Noem noted she also spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio about a potential transition before the congressional hearings, where Democratic lawmakers grilled her on immigration enforcement and a controversy involving Department of Homeland Security contracts and grants worth over $100,000 that required the secretary’s approval. Under new leadership, DHS reversed that policy.
Following the March hearings, President Donald Trump announced his decision to replace Noem with Markwayne Mullin, then a Republican senator of Oklahoma. Trump then appointed Noem as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a U.S.-led multinational coalition to combat drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere.
Noem said the new role has given her the opportunity to share her experience leading DHS initiatives with multiple nations.
“There’s 39 countries approximately in the Western Hemisphere that I get the chance to work with and tell them what we do to secure our critical infrastructure, how we fight on cybersecurity initiatives to keep our critical infrastructure safe, and to protect our businesses,” she told host Maria Bartiromo.
The former DHS chief thanked Trump and Rubio for not completely ejecting her from the administration.
“I appreciate both of them wanting to keep me a part of the team, recognizing the valuable asset and knowledge that I have that I can bring to the table,” she said.
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Seventeen nations are part of the Shield of the Americas alliance, most of which are Latin American countries. Despite its close cooperation with the United States, Mexico is notably absent from the counter-cartel coalition.
Besides leading the Shield of the Americas, Noem recently joined the advisory board of NovaRed Mining, a mineral exploration company based in Vancouver, Canada.