Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Monday evening that she and her family were thrown into a “panic” over an ambiguous social media post from California’s governor.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), long known to be a nemesis of Noem due to disagreements about immigration and other matters, raised eyebrows last week when his press office released a statement promising the secretary would “have a bad day today.”
Noem said during a Fox News interview that the post was “really menacing.”
“It was cryptic, and it was really menacing. … It immediately panicked my family and friends,” she told Sean Hannity in the wake of political violence that shook the country earlier this month through the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“Within, I would say, a couple of minutes of that being posted, I started to get text messages and phone calls. Family, my kids saying, ‘Are you OK, Mom? Are you fine?’ They know the threats that I’ve had,” Noem said. “This is a day and age where we’ve always known that words matter, but there’s been real consequences that we have realized that have happened to incredible people like Charlie that we’ll have to live with forever, and I hope we all learn from that.”
Newsom’s post prompted acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli to order a Secret Service investigation into the situation. Los Angeles’s top federal prosecutor said he had “zero tolerance for direct or implicit threats against government officials” and directed the Secret Service to conduct “a full threat assessment.”
Newsom’s office has pointed to a similar post President Donald Trump made, warning of a “bad day” coming for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2020.
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However, Noem declined to give the Newsom administration a pass.
“They know the threats that they’ve had, the things that have happened to them because of politicians like this that say things and somebody grabs on to them that has an agenda,” she said. “I hope we all learn that it’s time to start listening to each other, having civil discourse, and stop ridiculous, irresponsible posts like Governor Newsom put out there.”